Chapter 9 - THE AFTERMATH IN THE CITY
Back in Manhattan, the forty-first floor of Vescari Tower was quiet in a way no one in the organization had ever experienced.
It was nine o'clock on Monday night.
In the private office, Matteo sat behind his mahogany desk. The room was dark except for the single desk lamp illuminating a stack of printouts from the Nassau clearinghouse.
The numbers were there. The five million had been deducted at one-fifty-eight P.M.
At precisely two-fifteen, using the secondary rolling key that Vivien had entered into her personal terminal before leaving the penthouse thirty-six hours ago, the Nassau system had automatically re-encrypted its primary access protocols.
A new master key had been generated.
A single text message had arrived on Matteo's secure phone at two-sixteen:
Key string 0419-7782-9901. Don't change it again. It works.
Matteo looked at the screen of his phone.
She had given him his business back.
She hadn't kept the Nassau key to hold him hostage for the rest of his life. She had taken her five million, taken her house, locked her door, and handed him the keys to his own kingdom with the cold, effortless efficiency of a bank teller closing a mortgage file.
The door to his office opened quietly.
Paulie stepped inside. He had changed his shoes, but his trousers still bore faint specks of dried Quebec mud around the cuffs.
"Boss," Paulie said softly.
"What?"
"Lena Marik is downstairs," Paulie said, hesitating near the door frame. "She's been waiting in the lobby since eight. She says she left her diamond earrings in the master guest bathroom on Saturday night."
Matteo didn't look up from his phone screen.
He remembered Lena Marik standing inside his three-foot radius at the party, her green dress, her hand on his chest, her laugh echoing through the room while Vivien stood in the hallway doorway watching them.
He remembered how easy Lena had felt. How light. How completely uncomplicated by any understanding of where his money came from or what it cost to keep Vescari Tower standing against the city.
"Tell her to buy new ones," Matteo said.
Paulie blinked. "Boss?"
"Tell her to leave," Matteo said, his voice flat, dry, completely empty of tone. "And tell security if she comes back to the building, they drop her off the guest list permanently."
Paulie stood still for two seconds, his eyes searching Matteo's face in the dim light of the desk lamp. He saw something in his boss's jawline—a line of cold, permanent granite that hadn't been there on Friday morning.
"Got it, boss," Paulie whispered. He turned to leave.
"Paulie," Matteo called out.
"Yeah, boss?"
"Call the contractor who put the wardrobe in the master bedroom four years ago."
Paulie frowned. "The wardrobe?"
"Tell him I want him to come rip out the bottom drawer," Matteo said, his eyes fixed on the empty glass wall looking out over Fifty-Seventh Street. "Tell him I want to see what's behind the wall."
When Paulie closed the door, Matteo leaned back in his leather chair.
He picked up his glass of bourbon from the desk, took a small sip, and set it back down on its crystal coaster.
The penthouse was quiet.
No sounds of silk dresses rustling in the walk-in closet. No faint smell of lavender oil coming from the bathroom counter. No cool, quiet voice telling him that the councilman's wife preferred lilies over roses and that the longshoremen's union had agreed to the four percent rate on Pier 42.
He had his sixty-eight million. He had his judges. He had his waterfront. He had his forty-two million dollars in commercial real estate and his forty-one floors of glass and steel in the center of Manhattan.
He had everything he had ever built, everything he had ever fought for, everything he had ever stolen or bought or squeezed out of other men's throats over thirty-eight years of life.
And sitting in his dark office on a Monday night, looking down at the grid of lights eight hundred feet below him, Matteo Vescari finally realized the single, terrible truth that Vivien had left behind on her nightstand along with her platinum wedding ring:
May you like
He had kept the empire.
And she had taken the only thing that made it work.
