Before Adrian Died

Chapter 5: Blood on the Inheritance

Chapter 5: Blood on the Inheritance

Seraphina

The call came at 4:12 on Monday afternoon, while I was reading page four of my uncle's document for the ninth time.

I answered on the first ring. "Yes?"

"Miss Vale." It wasn't Harlan. This voice was younger, rougher, and shaking. "This is Danny Pruett, at the Brooklyn docks. You need to come. Right now."

"What's happened?"

"It's Sal." A choked breath. "They got Sal."

Salvatore Brennan had run the Vale Brooklyn warehouses for twenty-two years. He had taught me to count cargo manifests when I was fourteen, slipping me butterscotch candies when my father wasn't looking. He had a laugh like a truck engine and a bad knee, and he called me kid until the day I turned twenty-five, when he started calling me boss with a wink that told me he meant both.

I got there in thirty-five minutes.

Warehouse Four sat at the end of Pier 9, a long grey building with a corrugated roof and the Vale name stencilled in white along its side. Tonight it was ringed with police cars and the pulsing red-blue of emergency lights, and the air smelled of wet concrete and smoke.

"Miss Vale," said a uniformed officer, stepping into my path. "You can't—"

"I own it."

He blinked. Looked at my face. Stepped aside.

Harlan was beside me, and I was grateful for it. I wasn't sure my legs would have carried me alone.

Inside, the loading floor was a ruin. Crates overturned, pallets split open, a forklift on its side like a dead animal. The fire had been small, a controlled burn along one wall, as if someone had wanted to make a point rather than a catastrophe.

And in the middle of the floor, beneath a yellow tarp, lay a shape I knew.

"Don't," said Danny, grabbing my sleeve. He was twenty-three, one of Sal's crew, with soot on his face and tears he hadn't wiped away. "Miss Vale. Please. Don't look."

I looked.

Sal's eyes were open. There was a hole in his chest, neat and small, and a surprising amount of blood had pooled beneath him, dark and spreading. His big hands lay open at his sides. One of them still held the butterscotch he'd been unwrapping.

I stood there for a long time.

"When?" I finally asked.

"Around two. Three men came in. They said they wanted to talk to him about the transition. He told them to wait for you." Danny's voice cracked. "He wouldn't give them the keys, boss. He wouldn't."

Of course he wouldn't.

"Where were you?"

"Back office. I heard the shot." He swallowed. "They saw me. One of them, he looked right at me and said, Tell Miss Vale the family's generosity has an expiration date."

Detective Marsh found me twenty minutes later, standing by the loading doors where the wind came off the river.

He was a heavy man in a rumpled coat, with the weary courtesy of someone who'd seen too many Vales and too many Calloways. He had the kind of eyes that noticed everything and recorded none of it.

"Miss Vale. My condolences."

"Thank you."

"I'll be blunt. This looks like a robbery gone wrong."

"Does it?"

"Nothing was taken." He glanced around the warehouse. "But we'll investigate thoroughly."

I looked at him, and for the first time that day, I almost laughed. "Detective, you said that sentence the way a man reads from a card."

His face did not change. "I'm sorry you feel that way."

"Who called you?"

"Excuse me?"

"Who told you to say robbery?"

He held my gaze for a second too long. Then he tipped his head, almost imperceptibly, toward the shadows behind me, where a black sedan idled at the edge of the dock.

Calloway.

"Take care of yourself, Miss Vale," Marsh said quietly. And walked away.

I sat in the back of the car for a long time without speaking.

Harlan drove. He didn't ask where. He knew. We circled the harbour twice, past the blinking cranes and the dark water, while the shaking began in my hands and travelled up my arms.

"Boss," he said finally. "You've got to call someone."

"Who?"

"The Commission. The Five Families. Someone."

"Harlan." I rested my head against the cold window. "The man who killed Sal was in a police detective's pocket. My uncle is trying to take my father's company. Calloway owns the debt. Who exactly am I calling?"

He had no answer.

I thought about Sal's butterscotch. I thought about my father's missing pen, the forced drawer, the whiskey glass he hadn't finished. I thought about the three men who'd stood in that warehouse, looking at a seventy-year-old man with a bad knee, and decided he was a message.

Tell Miss Vale the family's generosity has an expiration date.

They wanted me frightened. They wanted me running to the only person who could sign the papers. They wanted me to pick up Victor's pen out of sheer terror.

And I was frightened. That was the unforgivable thing. I had stood in a room full of mourners and a room full of lawyers and I had not shaken once, but a small yellow candy in a dead man's hand had undone me.

"I can't protect all of it," I said quietly.

"Boss..."

"The warehouses. The docks. The men who work for us. My mother." I closed my eyes. "I don't have enough people. I don't have enough money. I don't have enough time."

"Then we find help."

"There's no one who—"

My phone rang.

An unknown number. I almost let it go. Then I saw the area code and the first four digits, and my stomach went cold, because I had seen them once before, on the card Avery slid across his desk, listing the lenders my father had avoided.

I answered. "Hello?"

"Miss Vale?" The voice was a stranger's. Professional, composed. "This is Marcus Webb, head of security at your mother's lake house."

Everything inside me stopped.

"Is she—"

"Mrs. Vale is safe. I want to say that first. She's safe." He drew a breath. "Forty minutes ago, two vehicles approached the property. Six men, armed. They cut the outer fence. We were outnumbered, and I thought—" He stopped. "I thought we were finished."

"What happened?"

"Another team arrived. Unmarked cars. Eight men, perhaps more. They didn't say a word to us. They engaged the intruders and drove them off. No casualties on our side. Two of theirs went down. Then they just... withdrew. They had left a perimeter, miss. A proper one. Men posted at every approach road. They're still there."

I was gripping the phone so hard my knuckles ached. "Did you recognise them?"

"No, ma'am. Not at first." A pause. "But one of the cars had a licence plate registered to a shipping company in Queens. I ran it, because I couldn't help it. It belongs to a subsidiary of Moretti Holdings."

The harbour lights blurred.

Moretti.

Of all the families in New York. Of all the men with enough guns and enough reach to arrive forty minutes before the police could, unasked, uninvited, silently.

Don't leave this grave alone tonight, he had said.

I'd thought it was a threat.

"Miss Vale?" Marcus said. "Should we stand down? Should we tell them to leave?"

I opened my mouth, and nothing came out.

Because the awful, unforgivable truth was this: if Damian Moretti's men had not been at the lake house tonight, my mother would be dead. And the only man in New York who had seen it coming, and done something about it, was the man I had spent two years believing killed my brother.

"No," I whispered. "Not yet. Let them stay."

I ended the call. Harlan was watching me in the rearview mirror, his face grey with worry.

"Miss Vale?"

"Take me home," I said.

"Home?"

"Home, Harlan." I stared at the dark water until it stopped moving. "I need to think about how much I'm willing to pay to save the people I love."

And how much of myself I'd have to sell to the devil to do it.