Chapter 4 - The Midnight Search and the First Real SmileBy noon, the industrial kitchen had been abandoned, the breakfast potatoes long since gone cold.
Roman didn't go to his office. Declan didn't go to the docks. And Gabriel stayed right beside me in my tiny, subterranean staff quarters at the end of the manor's service wing, watching as I dumped the contents of my battered cardboard moving box onto the narrow twin bed.
Hundreds of index cards spilled across the faded floral quilt. Fussy handwriting in faded blue ink: Grandma’s Apple Pie, Sunday Pot Roast, Buttermilk Biscuits, Lemon Drizzle Cake.
“This is insane,” I muttered, brushing a strand of hair out of my face with the back of my flour-dusted hand. “They’re just recipes. My mother loved baking. She spent every Sunday teaching me how to fold butter into pastry dough.”
“Helena didn't do anything without a reason,” Roman said, kneeling beside the bed. His tailored trousers were ruined by the dusty floorboards, but he didn't care. He picked up a card detailing a recipe for peach cobbler, holding it up to the weak light filtering through the high basement window. “Look at the measurements.”
I leaned in closer, my shoulder brushing against his chest.
“Three cups flour. One-half cup butter. Seven pinches of salt,” I read aloud. Then I paused. “Seven pinches of salt? Nobody measures salt in pinches unless they’re making a joke.”
Gabriel grabbed a pencil from the nightstand, flipping the card over. On the back, written in the margins of a pie crust instruction, was a sequence of numbers: 14-02-08-19.
“Coordinates,” Declan said from the doorway, his arms crossed over his chest. He had been standing guard outside the staff quarters all morning, his jaw tight. “Or a bank routing number.”
“It’s neither,” I said, a sudden memory flashing through my mind. “It’s a page and line number.”
I scrambled across the bed, pulling my mother’s heavy, leather-bound King James Bible from the bottom of the box—the only heavy book she had insisted on carrying from apartment to apartment, no matter how broke we were.
I flipped open the worn leather cover, turning to the Gospel of John, counting down the lines according to the numbers on the recipe card.
With trembling fingers, I slid the pages apart.
Tucked neatly into the binding was a thin, micro-perforated sheet of carbon paper covered in tiny, microscopic columns of numbers and names—the missing Falcone ledger.
For thirty seconds, nobody breathed.
Roman stared at the carbon paper in my hands. The ledger that had cost his family millions, that had driven his father mad, that had kept my mother running in the shadows for two decades—it was right here, resting on a cheap floral quilt in a basement room.
Slowly, Roman looked up at me. The ruthless syndicate boss, the man who terrified Boston, looked entirely defenseless.
“You could have used this,” Roman said quietly. “You could have sold it to our rivals, or walked into a federal prosecutor’s office, and you’d never have to scrub another floor or worry about your sister’s medical bills again.”
I looked down at the paper, then back at Roman.
“My mother spent her whole life running from this paper,” I said softly, sliding it back into the Bible and closing the cover. “She didn't want the money. She just wanted us to live. If I hand this over to you, what happens to us?”
Roman reached out. For the first time, his hand didn't shake. He gently placed his warm palm over my knuckles.
May you like
“Nothing happens to you,” Roman vowed, his voice ringing with absolute, unyielding authority. “Or your sister. As long as I draw breath, nobody touches you. You’re family, Maeve.”
For the first time since I walked through the gates of Falcone Manor into the freezing November rain, a genuine, small smile touched the corners of my mouth.
Related Stories
