Chapter 5 - The Night the Lights Went Out Again

By five that afternoon, Nicholas’s phone was off.

By six, his house was empty.

By seven, Dominic had learned that a blue Dominion sedan registered to a subsidiary had crossed the Illinois-Wisconsin line shortly after two in the morning on the night Mia saw the stranger.

The driver was not Nicholas.

Traffic cameras caught a younger man behind the wheel.

The image was grainy, but Frank recognized him as the garage technician who called himself Martin Cole.

His real name, according to Dominic’s people, was Aaron Vale.

Former private security.

Two arrests for assault.

One dismissed weapons charge.

Three years employed by a consulting company whose biggest client was Nicholas Marchetti.

It was enough to justify a police warrant.

It was not enough to find him.

“What happens now?” I asked.

Vincent stood at the window of his office, one hand in his pocket.

“We wait for the police to locate Vale.”

“And Nicholas?”

“They are requesting a warrant for his records.”

“You hate waiting.”

“Yes.”

“So do I.”

Mia was asleep on the leather sofa beneath a wool blanket, exhausted by a day of adults asking careful questions.

A child-witness specialist had come to the house after lunch. She spoke to Mia once, gently, without leading her. Vincent and I watched from another room.

Mia repeated the same basic story.

A man in rain.

A little light.

A black thing.

A shiny wolf ring.

A blue car.

And the words: Nick, I’m done.

The specialist warned us not to ask again.

Memory at three years old was fragile.

The more adults repeated a question, the easier it became for the question itself to change the answer.

I promised.

Vincent promised too.

Then he ordered every employee removed from the property except essential security and Mrs. Bellini.

“You’re sending people home into danger?” I asked.

“I’m reducing the number of people who can be used against us.”

“That is a very Vincent answer.”

He looked at me.

“What does that mean?”

“It means you turn people into pieces on a board when you’re scared.”

“I am not scared.”

“Of course not.”

His eyes narrowed.

I should have stopped.

I did not.

“You have thirty armed men, reinforced glass, armored cars, and three separate alarm systems. That is either fear or a very strange decorating preference.”

For two seconds he said nothing.

Then, unbelievably, he laughed.

It was quiet and brief, but real.

I stared.

“What?” he asked.

“I didn’t know you could do that.”

“Do what?”

“Sound like a person.”

His expression changed.

Not anger.

Something more vulnerable.

He looked at Mia sleeping on the sofa.

“She makes it difficult to remember I’m supposed to frighten everyone.”

I followed his gaze.

“She doesn’t know enough to be impressed.”

“Neither do you.”

“I know plenty.”

“That is the problem.”

The lights went out.

No flicker.

No warning.

Darkness swallowed the office.

Vincent moved before I did.

One second he was at the window.

The next he had crossed the room and pulled me behind the stone wall beside the fireplace.

Mia woke screaming.

“Mama!”

“I’m here.”

I crawled to the sofa in darkness, found her hands, and pulled her against me.

Red emergency strips should have illuminated along the baseboards.

They did not.

Vincent’s phone cast a pale glow across his face.

He tried his radio.

Static.

“Jammer,” he said.

“What?”

“Someone is blocking communications.”

A crash sounded downstairs.

Then another.

Not gunshots.

Glass.

Vincent drew a pistol from beneath his jacket.

I stared at it.

“Put that away from my daughter.”

“Elena.”

“Not away. Down. Keep it down.”

He lowered the muzzle toward the floor.

Even then, he listened.

That mattered.

Footsteps pounded in the corridor.

“Boss!”

Dominic.

Vincent opened the office door only after Dominic gave a code word I had never heard before.

The security chief entered with blood on his sleeve.

“You’re hurt.”

“Glass.”

“What happened?” Vincent asked.

“Generator panel was sabotaged. Two men breached through the east service entrance during the outage. We caught one. Other one is somewhere inside.”

My heart slammed against my ribs.

Mia began to whimper.

“Take them to the safe room,” Vincent ordered.

Dominic shook his head. “West hall is compromised.”

“Then basement.”

“No.”

The word came from me.

Both men looked at me.

“The main basement stairs pass the laundry corridor,” I said. “There is another way.”

Vincent frowned. “What way?”

“The old dumbwaiter service stair behind the pantry.”

Dominic stared at me.

“There’s a stair there?”

“I clean this house.”

Mrs. Bellini had shown it to me months earlier because the original pantry had once been connected to staff quarters upstairs. Nobody used it now except housekeeping when moving supplies during events.

It was narrow.

Ugly.

And not on the modern security plans.

I picked Mia up.

“Follow me.”

Vincent opened his mouth to argue.

I looked at him.

“You know guns. I know your house.”

He closed his mouth.

We moved.

Dominic went first, Vincent behind us.

The corridor smelled of smoke and plaster dust. Somewhere below, men shouted.

I kept Mia’s face pressed into my neck.

“Close your eyes, baby.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re playing the quiet game.”

“I hate the quiet game.”

“I know.”

She whispered, “Do I win candy?”

“Yes.”

“What kind?”

“Any kind.”

Vincent murmured behind me, “That is a dangerous promise.”

I almost laughed from pure terror.

We reached the pantry.

I pulled open a tall cabinet door filled with aprons, slid aside the false back panel, and exposed a narrow wooden stair descending into darkness.

Dominic blinked.

“I have worked here eleven years.”

Mrs. Bellini’s voice floated from somewhere behind us.

“And you never dust.”

She appeared carrying a flashlight and, inexplicably, a cast-iron frying pan.

Vincent stared at it.

“What?” she snapped. “You people have guns. I cook.”

We descended.

The stair ended behind the old wine cellar.

From there, a corridor led to the boiler room and an exterior maintenance hatch near the greenhouse.

We were halfway down when Mia lifted her head.

“Peppermint.”

I stopped.

“What?”

She sniffed.

“Bad man smell.”

A soft sound came from above.

A shoe against wood.

Vincent’s hand touched my shoulder.

“Keep moving.”

Dominic turned his flashlight upward.

A shadow crossed the landing.

Then a man lunged into the stairwell.

Everything happened at once.

Dominic shoved Mrs. Bellini down three steps. Vincent pushed me and Mia behind the brick curve of the wall. The man above raised something metallic.

Vincent fired once.

The shot was deafening in the narrow passage.

Mia screamed.

The attacker dropped the weapon and collapsed against the railing, clutching his shoulder.

Alive.

Cursing.

Dominic climbed two steps and kicked the weapon away.

Vincent did not fire again.

I noticed that too.

When the lights finally returned ten minutes later, police were already entering the grounds.

The man in the stairwell was not Aaron Vale.

Before anyone questioned him, paramedics treated his shoulder and police took custody. Detective Ramos arrived personally, furious that the estate’s private security had engaged before officers reached the interior. Vincent did not argue.

“He had a weapon,” Dominic said.

“I can see that,” Ramos replied. “And now every action in that stairwell is evidence. Nobody cleans a thing.”

Mrs. Bellini looked offended. “That stair has not been properly cleaned since 1998.”

Ramos stared at her.

Mrs. Bellini stared back.

“Fine,” the detective said. “Continue not cleaning it.”

Even Mia laughed weakly against my shoulder.

The man’s name was Peter Sloan.

He had a key fob for Nicholas’s Highland Park office in his pocket.

He also had a folded photograph.

Of me.

And Mia.

Taken outside the carriage house six weeks earlier.

On the back, someone had written two words.

THE WITNESS.

That night, after Mia finally stopped shaking, I found Vincent alone in the kitchen.

He was washing blood from his hands.

Not much.

A smear from Dominic’s arm or the attacker’s shoulder.

Still, the sight made something inside me crack.

“This has to end.”

He turned off the faucet.

“It will.”

“No. That is what powerful men say when they want everyone else to tolerate one more terrible night.”

“Elena—”

“I am leaving with Mia as soon as the police can move us somewhere safe.”

His face went still.

“I understand.”

That hurt more than if he had argued.

I hated myself for that.

Then he said, “And I am going to give them everything they need to destroy what my family built.”

I stared at him.

“What does that mean?”

Vincent looked toward the dark window over the sink.

“It means Nicholas is not the only reason men like Aaron Vale exist.”

His reflection stared back at him.

“I am.”

I wanted to reject the sentence because it sounded too absolute.

“You did not send those men tonight.”

“No. But I helped build a world where men are hired to solve problems with fear.”

“That does not make every crime yours.”

“No.” He looked at me. “But pretending I am only a victim would be another lie.”

I had no answer for that.

Upstairs, Mia called for me in her sleep.

I turned toward the stairs.

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Vincent did not ask me to stay.

That small restraint mattered more than a promise would have.