Chapter 4
Cassian did not come. He bolted.
With the frantic speed of a cornered rat, the younger Vanderley brother threw his weight against the French doors leading to the conservatory, smashing the glass panes with his shoulder as he burst through into the dark, foliage-draped gallery beyond.
"Keller, hold the room," Everard ordered, his voice flat and level. "Nobody moves. Nobody speaks."
Everard did not run. He walked with a terrifying, rhythmic stride, his leather shoes crunching over the shards of broken beveled glass on the threshold. The cold night air from the cracked garden windows rushed into the conservatory, carrying the scent of damp peat moss, night-blooming jasmine, and ozone.
The conservatory was a labyrinth of towering exotic palms, wrought-iron planters, and marble statues, illuminated only by the silver moonlight filtering through the arched glass dome thirty feet above.
A shadow moved behind the high leaves of a banana tree near the fountain.
"You think you can rule this city forever, Everard?" Cassian’s voice echoed off the glass walls, shrill, breathless, and shaking with hysteria. "You’re an old relic! You run the Vanderley empire like a nineteenth-century mafia syndicate! The world has changed! We needed corporate legitimacy, and your wife was an obstacle!"
Everard drew the black 1911 from beneath his arm. The heavy slide racked back with a crisp, oiled mechanical snap that echoed like a whip through the leaves.
"You locked my wife in a maintenance shaft ten feet from where my daughter plays scales," Everard murmured into the dark. "You let her starve while you drank my scotch in the library."
"She was going to cooperate with the Grand Jury!" Cassian shouted from behind a fluted marble pillar. "She had the shipping manifests for the southern pier! She was going to hand the entire port authority over to the United States Attorney! Aurelia and I were protecting the bloodline!"
Everard stopped beside the tiered central fountain. Water trickled softly into the basin, splashing over carved stone cherubs.
"Honora doesn't know how to read a maritime manifest, Cassian," Everard said, his voice dropping into that quiet, predatory whisper that had preceded every execution in the harbor wars of 2018. "She never cared about the docks. She cared about Minnie. You didn't lock her up to stop a federal indictment."
A rustle of palm fronds betrayed Cassian’s shift to the left.
"You locked her up," Everard continued, pacing toward the sound, "because the deed to the Vanderley deep-water terminal was held in her name under my father's private trust. And by state law, if she vanished without a body for seven years, the conservatorship defaulted to you and Aurelia."
Silence fell over the conservatory. The only sound was the drip of water and Cassian’s ragged, wheezing gasps behind the stone column.
"You were going to let her die in that wall," Everard said. "Slowly. So there would never be an autopsy. So there would never be a crime scene."
"Everard—"
Everard fired once.
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The heavy .45-caliber round obliterated the ornamental fern three inches from Cassian’s right ear, sending shredded green leaves and terracotta shrapnel exploding across the younger brother’s face.
Cassian screamed, dropping his weapon—a small, silver derringer that tumbled uselessly into the fountain basin—and threw himself onto his hands and knees on the flagstones.
