Chapter 9 - THE NIGHT BEFORE THE GALA
At midnight, Dominic showed up at my apartment with pizza.
No guards.
No armored SUV.
Just pizza.
“You came alone?”
“They're downstairs.”
“Of course they are.”
Evelyn was asleep in my bed again.
Daniel had gone to meet federal investigators.
Rafe was with his daughter.
For the first time in two days, the apartment was quiet.
Dominic set the pizza on the counter.
“I owe you dinner.”
“You owe me eight dollars.”
“I was told never to negotiate with dangerous people.”
I smiled.
He didn't.
Not immediately.
Then he did.
I saw the man beneath the reputation.
Tired.
Funny when he forgot not to be.
And very, very lonely.
“Why are you really shutting it down?” I asked.
He looked toward the bedroom where Evelyn slept.
“Because my father was wrong about many things, but he was right about one.”
“What?”
“You can't build a safe home with money that makes everyone around you afraid.”
That sentence changed something between us.
He told me he had spent years moving employees into legitimate work, selling dangerous interests, and cooperating quietly with attorneys.
Victor had resisted every step.
“Tomorrow ends it,” he said.
“That's dramatic.”
“It runs in the family.”
At 1:17 A.M., someone knocked.
Dominic drew a gun.
I grabbed the nearest weapon available.
A frying pan.
He looked at it.
“Really?”
“It worked for cartoons.”
The visitor was Michael.
Dominic's supposedly dead brother.
He looked older than the photograph, but the resemblance was undeniable.
Evelyn woke.
When she saw him, she began crying.
Their reunion was painful, beautiful, and awkward.
Then Michael produced something he'd hidden for eighteen years.
Anthony Vescari's handwritten journal.
The final pages described Victor's betrayal.
There was enough information to destroy him.
But one page was missing.
Michael explained that Anthony had given that page to Sarah Bennett.
My mother.
I stopped breathing.
“Why?”
“Because Sarah wasn't only the nurse who saved Dominic.”
Michael looked directly at me.
“She was the witness Anthony trusted most.”
I felt dizzy.
“Witness to what?”
Michael answered quietly.
“The night Victor ordered your father's murder.”
Then he revealed the secret my mother had carried until her death:
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Sarah Bennett had testified anonymously eighteen years ago.
And Victor had spent nearly two decades trying to discover who she was.
