Chapter 3
Dovie didn't point with a child’s sudden enthusiasm. She raised her small, pale hand with agonizing slowness, her index finger trembling in the air.
The sixty guests in the conservatory shrank back collectively, as if the child held a loaded firearm. Men who commanded multi-million-dollar distribution networks and judges who decided federal sentences suddenly found themselves terrified of a six-year-old’s fingertip.
Her finger drifted past Senator Albright. Past the Corvo brothers from the South Side. Past the cousins who ran the trucking terminals in Newark.
It stopped dead on a man standing beside the third marble archway.
Julian Whitmere.
Torsten’s thirty-six-year-old nephew. Julian was a man built like an athlete, dressed in an Italian silk tuxedo with mother-of-pearl buttons. His hair was parted with razor sharpness, his rosy skin unblemished, his jawline sporting the confident, modern sheen of the family’s new corporate generation. On his lapel, catching the bright conservatory light, was a bespoke platinum pin shaped like a coiled serpent—the insignia of the Whitmere Investment Trust.
Julian’s smile remained fixed on his face for half a second before the muscles around his eyes seized.
"Dovie," Julian chuckled, his voice rich, perfectly modulated, the accent smooth prep-school American. "Honey, you're confused. Uncle Julian wasn't at the lake house on Thursday. I was in Manhattan closing the midtown logistics buyout. You remember, Uncle Torsten? I called you from the Four Seasons."
Dovie did not lower her hand.
"You smelled like mint," Dovie said clearly, her small voice cutting through Julian’s baritone like a razor. "You walked up the stairs after Mommy fell. You had the blue papers in your leather bag. You told Daddy that if Mommy didn't wake up by morning, they would use her thumb to press the ink."
The temperature in the glass room seemed to drop ten degrees.
Lavinia let out a low, shuddering gasp, pulling Dovie tighter against her bruised ribs. "Julian… you were there? You told him to do it?"
Julian’s easy smile finally slid off his face. His eyes darted to the perimeter doors, where Bruno stood with his arms crossed, broad shoulders blocking the frame. He looked toward the front terrace, where Cassian had already palmed his sidearm beneath his lapel.
"Uncle Torsten, this is absurd," Julian said, his voice tightening, dropping the charm. "You’re going to indict your own blood, the man who increased our commercial revenues by forty percent this quarter, based on the crayon scribbles of a traumatized toddler?"
Torsten took three slow steps forward. His dress shoes clicked on the flagstones with the measured cadence of a death march.
"My granddaughter doesn't know what an ink transfer is, Julian," Torsten murmured.
"She heard it somewhere! Merrick has been talking out of his head for weeks!" Julian took a half-step back, his heel hitting the base of a stone planter. "Look at him! He’s a degenerate gambler! He’s in debt to the Albanians for four million dollars. He probably came up with this scheme to forge Lavinia’s signature and now he’s dragging my name into it to save his pathetic skin!"
On the floor, Merrick rolled onto his side, his face smeared with snot and blood.
"You liar!" Merrick screamed, spitting red onto the carpet. "You son of a bitch, Julian! You gave me the notary seal! You said the old man was losing his grip, that the Commission in New York wanted him retired by August! You said if I secured Lavinia’s maritime shares, I’d get the northern docks!"
A collective shudder ran through the family members.
The Commission. The northern docks. The words hung in the clean white light of the conservatory like toxic vapor.
Torsten stopped five feet from his nephew.
"The Commission," Torsten repeated, his voice quiet, almost reflective. "You went to New York behind my back, Julian?"
Julian stood as tall as he could, but a bead of sweat broke along his fair hairline, tracking down toward his temple. "The business has changed, Uncle. You’re running this syndicate like it’s 1985. You sit on the shipping ports, you refuse to touch the pharmaceutical distributions, you let hundreds of millions slip through our fingers because of your old-world morals. The family is bleeding out financially while you play the noble patriarch."
"Is that why you tried to murder my daughter?" Torsten asked.
"Nobody was supposed to die!" Julian snapped, his composure finally fracturing into pure, venomous arrogance. "Lavinia was supposed to sign! She was supposed to take her twenty million and go live in Paris with the kid! But she inherited your stubborn, arrogant pride. She spat in Merrick’s face. She threw a decanter at him!"
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"So you watched him push her," Torsten said.
"I watched him handle a problem," Julian sneered, his chest heaving beneath his silk lapels. "And if you were half the boss you used to be, you would have handled it thirty years ago."
