Chapter 4
The silence in the room hardened into concrete.
Dacre lunged forward, his face twisting into panic. "Della, shut your mouth! You don't know what you're talking about!"
"Touch her," Ronan murmured, "and you will leave this room without your fingers."
Dacre froze mid-stride, his hand suspended in the air, his eyes darting frantically between his father and the watching crowd.
Ronan knelt on one knee in the center of the dance floor. He did not care about the crease in his tailored charcoal trousers. He smoothed the tangled golden curls away from Della's pale face, wiping a smudge of soot from her rosy cheek with his thumb.
"What did you see, little bird?" Ronan asked, his voice impossibly gentle.
"Mommy was crying in the basement kitchen," Della said, her small fingers wrapping around Ronan’s signet ring. "It was the night before Daddy brought Sybil to the house. Daddy was yelling about the papers. And then Sybil’s brother came."
Senator Vane stepped forward, his face turning an apoplectic red. "That is enough! Slandering my family using a coached child is an outrage! Julian was in Washington on business two years ago!"
"Julian wasn't in Washington," Della whispered, looking directly at the Senator with wide, unblinking eyes. "He had muddy boots. He helped Daddy put Mommy into the big silver trunk from the trunk room. The one with the heavy brass locks."
A collective gasp rippled through the gathered elite. Women covered their mouths with gloved hands; men stepped back, glancing toward the arched exits where Ronan’s guards stood with crossed arms.
Sybil’s face drained of every drop of color. She looked as though she had been struck with an iron bar. "She's insane! She's having nightmares! Dacre, tell them she's making it up!"
Dacre could not speak. His lower jaw quivered erratically, beads of cold sweat running down his temple and pooling in the hollow of his collar. He reached up with trembling fingers to loosen his black silk bowtie, gasping for air as if the room had been emptied of oxygen.
Ronan stood up.
He rose to his full height, his broad back blotting out the light of the central chandelier. The gentle grandfather was gone; in his place stood the executioner who had buried thirty rivals beneath the foundations of the northern shipping docks.
"Silas," Ronan said without turning his head.
The lead bodyguard stepped forward instantly from the perimeter. "Yes, Mr. Crestwell."
"Take eight men. Go to the Crestwell hunting lodge in Blackwood Basin. Check the cellar beneath the old tool shed. The concrete was poured twenty-two months ago, right after Dacre asked for two hundred thousand dollars to renovate the foundation."
Dacre’s knees finally buckled. He collapsed onto the hardwood floor, landing heavily on his hands and knees, staring down at the reflection of his own ruined face in the polished lacquer.
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"Dad," Dacre wept, tears cutting dark tracks through the sweat on his cheeks. "Dad, it was an accident! I swear to God it was an accident! She threatened to go to the District Attorney! She was going to blow the entire maritime contract wide open! She said I was laundering money for the cartels through her father's union accounts!"
"So you killed her," Ronan said, his voice flat as a frozen lake. "You murdered the mother of your child, and then you invited her killers to drink champagne on my dance floor."
