Part 4
Nico asked Hannah to take Rosie upstairs before he said anything else.
The child wanted the box back. He promised she would have it after Walter repaired a loose piece, and disliked himself for using that explanation.
Once the door closed, Walter bent over the image again.
“I need a finer blade than we have here. Force it, and we’ll split the case.”
“Get one.”
Nico kept the box beside him for the rest of the day. By nightfall, with security reports arriving and Paul revising the perimeter rotation, he had decided they would open it when Walter returned with the proper tools at dawn.
He slept in his study chair.
At 4:17, an impact shook plaster dust onto his sleeve.
He was standing before the alarm started.
Through the window, beyond the trees, headlights swung across the drive. A reinforced delivery truck had backed through the entrance gates. Men were jumping from its rear compartment.
Nico counted five before smoke obscured the view.
Paul met them near the fountain. He fired from behind its stone rim, dropped the leading attacker, then rose to cover the distance between the drive and the house. A burst caught him in the legs.
He went down, pulled himself behind the fountain, and kept shooting.
Nico was already in the upstairs hall.
Walter appeared at the other end with Hannah and Rosie. The child was half asleep against her mother’s shoulder. Rook stood between them and the stairwell.
“Linen passage,” Nico said. “Now.”
Walter opened the concealed panel behind the storage cupboards. Hannah hesitated long enough to look at Nico, then stepped through.
A gunman reached the upper landing before Rook followed her.
The dog struck him high, knocking his shoulder into the banister. The rifle swung sideways. Rook clamped down on the arm holding it and stayed there until the weapon fell. Then he released and returned to the hidden passage, favoring one shoulder.
Nico closed the panel behind them.
Two more attackers entered through the drawing-room doors downstairs. He fired before they could spread into the hall. The last man came at him from beside a bookcase, and Nico drove him into the shelves, struck him with the pistol, and hauled him into the pantry.
Outside, Paul’s gun fell silent.
Nico shoved the captured man against the lower cupboards.
“You came here for a child.”
The man tried to turn his face away. Nico caught his jacket and pulled him upright.
“Who bought her death?”
“I don’t know his name.”
“Then tell me what you do know.”
“Your house. He’s in your house.” The words stumbled over one another. “We got half. The other half after.”
“After what?”
The man looked at the pistol.
“After the girl was dead.”
Nico held him there until the man began pleading. Then he struck him once, hard enough to end the conversation, and called for a guard.
At the fountain, Paul had lost too much blood. Nico knelt beside him while the remaining guards secured the grounds. Paul’s hand closed around his wrist, then weakened before help could reach them.
Nico stayed until it opened.
In the hidden basement, Rosie sat on a cot with Rook stretched beside her. A shallow cut crossed the top of his shoulder. She stroked the uninjured side and hummed, missing most of the notes.
“It’s all right,” she whispered. “Uncle Nico won’t let them get us.”
Nico stood inside the doorway until Walter said his name.
Daylight showed the gates hanging crookedly from their posts. Walter had laid his tools on the desk. Hannah stood opposite Nico in his overcoat, her bare feet gray with dust from the concealed stairs.
Rosie slept upstairs. Rook had allowed Walter to clean his shoulder, then returned to her room.
The fine blade traveled along the inner seam of the music box. Walter stopped twice to change its angle. At last the thin panel loosened.
A memory card rested in a felt-lined hollow. Beside it lay a folded scrap of paper.
Hannah recognized the handwriting before Nico opened it.
He spread the note beneath the lamp.
“By the time this is found, I’ll be gone. Believe the dog. Doubt the men. T.”
Hannah gripped the desk. Nico moved a chair behind her just before her knees gave way.
She pressed her fist against her mouth. He waited beside her without touching her until she reached for his sleeve.
Walter had already opened his laptop.
The card held years of records: payment schedules, copied authorizations, invoices, and Thomas’s painstaking comparisons. Instead of reading them in file order, Nico searched the approvals first.
Everett’s digital countersignature appeared again and again.
Across the four years Thomas had documented, seventeen million dollars had disappeared through nonexistent vendors and false freight charges. Three Bellandi construction businesses had paid companies whose registered premises were vacant parcels in Parma and Vienna. The transfers eventually reached a holding company in Innsbruck.
Thomas had followed its ownership back to Arturo Serrani.
Serrani controlled the rival freight network stretching around the lower lakes. His men had tried to reach Nico’s bedroom from the roof two winters before.
Walter opened the final file.
Everett’s voice came from the laptop, composed and unmistakable.
“Once Bellandi is gone, our territorial agreement takes effect. Leave the dog to me. He won’t accept another handler. I’ll dispose of him separately.”
Another man asked about the accountant.
“That problem is finished,” Everett replied. “He won’t be asking anything else.”
Walter stopped the recording.
Hannah bent forward in the chair. Nico put Thomas’s note beneath his palm so she wouldn’t have to keep looking at it.
“No copies leave this room,” he said. “Julian gets nothing until I’ve decided how to use it. Neither do the guards.”
Walter closed the laptop.
Nico stared at the little birds carved into the lid. He remembered Rook on the foyer rug eight months earlier, when Everett had returned from an extended trip. The dog had risen before Everett took off his coat. Nico had called him back, angry at the torn trouser leg and the teeth still showing.
He had struck Rook’s muzzle.
He had apologized to Everett.
The desk phone rang.
Nico answered without sitting.
Julian spoke quietly. “Everett’s been calling me. He wants to know what we found in the music box…”
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