Chapter 3 - Behind the Welded Door
The silence inside the mezzanine office was so absolute that I could hear the faint ticking of the gold watch on Vincent Russo’s wrist across the room.
Dante did not rise immediately from where he crouched beside Sophie; instead, he lifted his dark eyes slowly from the red crayon scar on the paper to my pale, trembling face.
"Say that street address again, Missus Lane," Dante said, his voice dropping into a register so quiet and lethal that even Vincent took a half step closer to the desk.
"Forty-Three East Tenth Street in the East Village, it was an Italian bistro called Cena D’Oro where my husband Marcus worked as the night line cook until the kitchen ventilation system exploded on December fourteenth two years ago," I said, holding onto the back of the leather chair as my heart pounded.
Dante stood up slowly, exchanged a single razor-sharp look with Vincent Russo that carried twenty years of unspoken history, and walked over to the inner door leading to his private living quarters.
"Miss Lane, inside that white room is a television bigger than a movie screen, a box of sixty-four crayons, and a very nice lady named Officer Claudia who is going to make you strawberry pancakes while I borrow your mother for ten minutes," Dante told Sophie warmly.
Sophie looked up at me for permission, and when I forced a smile and nodded, she happily skipped into the reinforced safe room where a female close-protection officer closed the steel-core door behind her.
The second the latch clicked shut, Dante turned back to me, every trace of gentle warmth vanishing into cold, volcanic intensity.
"Your husband Marcus Lane did not die in a random grease fire, Marissa," Dante said without a single word of preamble as he unlocked a concealed biometric wall panel behind a painting of the Manhattan harbor.
"What are you talking about, the city fire marshal ruled that an uncleaned grease trap ignited the main exhaust hood and engulfed the ceiling in forty-three seconds," I protested, my voice shaking.
"Cena D’Oro was secretly owned by a Delaware real estate holding company belonging to my family, and on the night of December fourteenth two years ago, a federal shipping auditor was supposed to meet me in the private dining room upstairs with a list of corrupt city officials who were smuggling narcotics through my Brooklyn piers," Dante revealed coldly.
My knees nearly buckled as the room seemed to tilt beneath my feet.
"The fire was a professional military-grade thermite hit planted inside the basement exhaust intake to assassinate that auditor and burn the files, and according to our private investigation, your husband Marcus was the only man in the basement who smelled the chemical accelerant early and died trying to pull the manual fire-suppression lever that the arsonist had wired shut," Dante said quietly.
Tears of hot, blinding rage spilled down my cheeks as I realized the man I had mourned for twenty-four months had been murdered in a corporate war I didn’t even know existed.
"And three years ago, eleven months before your husband’s restaurant burned, the exact same forty-three-second chemical thermite compound was used on the twelfth floor of this hotel in the fire that killed my wife Elena," Dante added, his jaw clenching so hard the scar above his eyebrow turned stark white.
"Why would the arsonist who killed my husband and your wife come back to the twelfth floor of this hotel last night carrying a briefcase marked with the restaurant’s fire code," I asked as I wiped my face with the back of my hand.
"Because Floor Twelve wasn’t just my late wife’s residence—behind the burned west wing is the original cast-iron pre-war vault where my father stored the physical paper deeds and bearer certificates for every pier we control, and yesterday afternoon I received word that someone inside my own hotel was preparing to sell that vault combination to the syndicate," Dante answered as he pulled a black nine-millimeter pistol from his wall safe and handed a second weapon to Vincent.
"Wait a minute, last night at midnight Caleb Ross cornered me in the service hallway and showed me a security tablet claiming the elevator override code that let the gray-coat man onto Floor Twelve was entered from my bar register at seven-fifteen," I told Dante rapidly.
"Caleb Ross has master administrative rights to spoof any terminal address in this building from his office computer," Vincent growled as he checked his magazine.
"Stay behind me and do not touch anything once the doors open," Dante ordered me as the three of us stepped into his private executive elevator and he turned two separate physical brass keys simultaneously in the twelfth-floor override lock.
The elevator ascended smoothly in dead silence until the digital indicator read 12 and the brass doors slid open onto a dark, eerie corridor that smelled faintly of old char and sealed plaster.
The heavy steel fire doors that were supposed to seal off the burned west wing had been cut through cleanly with a plasma torch, the molten edges of the padlock still sitting on the soot-stained carpet.
With his pistol raised at eye level, Dante led us silently through the ruined foyer of his former home until we reached the library at the end of the hall, where the massive iron door of the pre-war wall vault stood wide open.
Inside the vault, the steel shelving where the pier deeds were kept had been emptied, and lying squarely on the dusty marble floor in front of the vault was a charred brass keychain stamped with the words "CENA D’ORO — KITCHEN STAFF #4" alongside my husband’s burned metal locker tag!
May you like
Before I could bend down to pick up Marcus’s tag, the heavy steel fire door at the entrance of the twelfth-floor corridor slammed shut via remote magnetic lock, the private elevator car plunged back down the shaft without us, and a sharp, metallic hissing sound erupted from all four ceiling ventilation grates above our heads!
White, odorless pressurized gas began pouring into the sealed twelfth-floor suite while a small red digital timer bolted inside the open vault door began counting down from forty-three seconds!
