Chapter 2
The silence inside the conservatory stretched until the faint trickling of the fountain sounded like footsteps on gravel.
"Cassian. Bruno," Torsten said, his tone conversational, almost polite.
Two men in dark charcoal suits peeled away from the glass perimeter walls. They had been standing near the caterers’ service entrance, unobtrusive as structural pillars. They didn't draw weapons, but their right hands vanished beneath the cuts of their bespoke jackets.
"Lock the glass doors," Torsten commanded. "No one leaves the terrace. No one takes a call. Anyone touches their pocket, put them through the flagstones."
"Yes, Mr. Whitmere," Cassian murmured, his hand already turning the heavy brass deadbolt on the western French doors.
A murmur of panic fluttered through the women in the front row. Senator Albright’s wife took a step back, her champagne flute trembling against her diamonds, but Torsten’s gaze swept across the room like a cold blade, and the gathering instantly petrified again.
Torsten turned his back on the crowd and crouched beside the upholstered bench. His trousers strained slightly against his muscular frame, but his posture remained rigid.
"Lavinia," he said.
His daughter did not look up. Her knuckles were white where she held the cashmere shawl tight to her throat. Her dark hair was pinned up for the reception, exposing the pale nape of her neck, where a faint yellowing discoloration peeked out beneath the silk fringe.
"Look at me, sweetheart," Torsten whispered.
Lavinia’s chin trembled. Slowly, she lifted her face. Her rosy cheeks were blotched with silent misery.
Torsten reached out. His thick, scarred fingers, usually associated with signing contracts and ordering executions, were impossibly delicate as he pinched the corner of the green shawl.
"Don't, Dad," she breathed, her American accent clipped, choked with a terror that wasn't directed at him. "Not here. Please. Not in front of everyone."
"Take it off," Torsten said.
"Dad—"
"Take it off, Lavinia."
With a ragged exhale, Lavinia loosened her grip. The emerald cashmere slipped from her shoulders and pooled in her lap like melted wax.
A collective gasp rippled through the nearest guests.
Her right shoulder was an anatomical ruin of trauma. The collarbone was visibly misaligned, swollen under a mottled constellation of deep purple, sickly green, and black hematomas that stretched down to the curve of her breast. Across her upper arm, three distinct gouges showed where fingernails had dug through flesh to break her grip on a banister.
Torsten did not touch the injury. He stared at it for three long seconds. In those three seconds, the veteran mafia boss seemed to age ten years, and then become ten years more lethal.
He turned slowly to Dovie.
The little girl was trembling against her mother’s thigh, her patent flats tucked beneath the hem of her ivory dress. She clutched the torn spiral notebook to her chest as if it were a shield.
"Dovie," Torsten said, his voice dropping into that gentle, velvet cadence reserved only for her. "You saw this happen at the lake house on Thursday, didn't you?"
Dovie nodded, a single tear cutting a pale line through the dust on her cheek. "I was hiding in the toy chest under the stairs. Because Daddy was yelling about the papers."
"What papers, baby?"
"The blue papers with the gold stamps," Dovie whispered. Her lower lip quivered. "Mommy said she wouldn't sign them. She said they belonged to Grandpa. And then Daddy grabbed her hair. He told her she was going to sign or she was going to sleep in the mud."
On the floor, Merrick let out a wet, strangled cough. He had managed to roll onto his stomach, spitting a clot of dark blood onto a fallen linen runner. "She’s lying," he wheezed, his fingers clawing at the carpet as he tried to raise his chin. "Torsten, she’s six years old. She’s repeating things she saw on television. Lavinia fell down the porch steps because she had half a bottle of gin—"
Torsten stood up.
He didn't look at Merrick. He didn't even turn his head. He simply took two strides back toward the fallen display rack, raised his polished right shoe, and brought the heel down with surgical precision onto the back of Merrick’s left hand.
A sickening crunch echoed through the conservatory.
Merrick shrieked, an animal wail that was cut short as Torsten leaned his full weight onto the crushed metacarpals.
"You interrupted my granddaughter," Torsten said, looking casually at the ceiling glass. "Don't do it again."
He lifted his foot. Merrick curled into a fetal ball, clutching his mangled hand against his chest, weeping openly now, the arrogance stripped away to reveal the hollow socialite underneath.
Torsten picked up the wet drawing from where he had laid it on the edge of the fountain. The water had begun to dry in the warm air, turning the pulpy paper stiff and translucent.
May you like
He tapped the second figure on the landing—the one drawn in heavy, deliberate black strokes.
"Dovie," Torsten said, his eyes scanning the crowd of sixty relatives, captains, and political cronies. "Tell Grandpa who was at the top of the stairs. Tell me who told Daddy to push her."
