Chapter 5 - The Forensic Accountant’s Ledger
The kitchen of the Red Hook warehouse was larger than my entire apartment in Queens. It was all stainless steel, dark slate, and industrial copper hung from the rafters, but it was empty of life. The refrigerator contained nothing but bottled water, three brands of expensive Italian soda, and a jar of imported olives.
It was 3:00 AM.
I sat at the long marble island, my burgundy dress wrinkled, my hair falling out of its pins. Dominic stood across from me, a bottle of thirty-year-old Scotch sitting between us untouched. He had changed into a plain black t-shirt, his massive shoulders covered in the dark ink of the wolf tattoo that stretched down his left arm.
"Why did you do it, Elena?" he asked. The rage was gone now, replaced by a cold, mathematical exhaustion. He looked at me across the marble like an auditor looking at a balance sheet that was missing five million dollars. "The ferry was verified. The Coast Guard found your coat on the deck. They found the bag with your ID inside the cabin."
"I left them there because if I didn't, your uncle Salvatore would have put a bullet in my head before the ship cleared the harbor," I said, my voice dead. I didn't look at his eyes; I looked at the pale scar on his jaw. "He found out I was auditing the Atlantic Basin accounts. He found out I knew about the Springfield transfers."
Dominic’s fingers tightened around his glass. "Salvatore died two years ago."
"I know," I said. "I read the papers. I checked the probate records to make sure his estate didn't try to track my social security number. But three years ago, he was alive, and he told me that if I ever told you about the money he was stealing from your father’s medical trust, he’d make sure my father’s warehouse in Jersey burned with him inside."
Dominic went perfectly still. The silence in the kitchen became so heavy I could hear the sleet hitting the metal exhaust vents on the roof.
"My father’s medical trust," Dominic repeated, his voice dangerously quiet. "Salvatore told me that money was lost in a market drop."
"It wasn't lost, Dominic," I said, reaching into my diaper bag and pulling out a small, encrypted thumb drive I kept hidden in the lining behind the wet wipes. I slid it across the marble. "It was routed through three shell companies in Panama, then used to buy a fleet of commercial tankers registered in Liberia. Salvatore wasn't just stealing from your father. He was funding the crew that tried to take you out in Brooklyn three years ago. The ones who gave you that scar on your face."
Dominic looked down at the silver thumb drive. His hand didn't move toward it immediately. He looked at it the way a soldier looks at an unexploded shell that had been sitting under his bed for a thousand days.
"You had this," he whispered. "You had the proof that would have cleared you with me, and you chose to jump off a boat into forty-degree water instead of bringing it to my office."
"Because you were his nephew, Dominic!" I shouted, my voice cracking as I stood up, my chair scraping loudly against the slate floor. "You were twenty-six years old, you had just taken the seat, and every man in your crew was testing your blood. If I had brought you that file, you would have had to kill Salvatore yourself, or let him kill you to save the family’s face. I didn't want to watch you become a monster just to keep me safe."
Dominic stood up too, his massive frame closing the distance between us until he was leaning over the island, his face inches from mine. "So you let me think you were dead? You let me spend three years sitting in that empty house in Long Island, drinking myself to sleep while my sons were being born in some state hospital in New Jersey?"
"Gary, Indiana," I corrected him, the tears hot in my eyes. "We lived in a two-room trailer behind a diesel repair shop for six months because I didn't have enough clean data to clear a credit check without alerting your uncle’s spotters. I cleaned toilets, Dominic. I did the books for a grease distributor for twelve dollars an hour while my belly was so big I couldn't reach the steering wheel."
Dominic’s breath hitched. His eyes dropped to my waist, then back to my face, the silver in them flashing with something that looked remarkably like grief.
"You should have told me," he said, his voice dropping into a broken whisper. "Elena... I would have burned the city down before I let you sleep in a trailer."
"That’s exactly why I didn't tell you," I said, wiping my face with the back of my hand. "Because the city doesn't need to burn for me to raise my children. Now, give me my keys. We're leaving."
"No," Dominic said, his hand coming down over the silver thumb drive, his fingers locking around the metal. "You aren't leaving. Not now. Not after I know Salvatore wasn't the only one involved."
He turned his head toward the dark window that looked out over the docks. "Nico!"
The kitchen door opened instantly. Nico had been standing in the hall the entire time. "Yes, Boss?"
"Get the digital forensic team down here from the Brooklyn office," Dominic ordered, his voice returning to that cold, iron certainty that allowed no argument. "Tell them to bring the deep-recovery rigs. I want every access log from the Atlantic Basin terminal from the last forty-eight months. And Nico?"
May you like
"Sir?"
"Call the night manager at the restaurant ninety-one floors up," Dominic said, his eyes locking back onto mine with a lethal, possessive brightness. "Tell him I want the security footage from table twelve from tonight. Every frame. Every angle. If he tells me the servers are down, tell him I’ll buy the restaurant by five, and he’ll be scrubbing the grease traps by six."
