Chapter 34 - THE TWO LEDGERS
Victor Caruso smiled. It was the same smile Nicholas saw every morning in the shaving mirror—cold, patient, entirely devoid of mercy.
"You look well, Nicky. A little thin around the collar, but you've held the territory better than I expected. The Genovese were terrified of you. That was good work with the Brooklyn docks in 2012. Very clean."
"Let Maria go," Nicholas said. His rifle was aimed at Victor's chest, right over the fourth horn button of his overcoat. "She's an innocent. She was Daniel’s sister. She didn't know about the Zurich codes."
"Nobody is an innocent in this city, Nicholas," Victor said, his thumb resting lightly on the Colt’s hammer. "Daniel knew what he was doing when he took my ledger. He thought because he changed his name from Santos to Smith and moved to Scarsdale, I wouldn't find him. He thought having a child would make him untouchable. As if children were shields."
"He was an accountant, Victor," Nicholas said. "You killed him for three hundred million you already stole from your own family."
"I didn't steal it, Nicky. I *am* the family," Victor said, stepping forward an inch, pulling Maria with him by her dark hair. She gasped, her knees dragging through the freezing silt. "That money wasn't meant for you. It was meant to buy the clean name. The political seats. The senators in Albany who won't take cash from a Caruso, but will take foundation grants from the Hart Trust."
"The Hart Trust is mine," Nicholas said. "My signature is on the charter."
"Your signature is on the public papers," Victor laughed softly. "The secondary charter—the one filed in the registry in Bern—has one name on it. Mine. But to release the escrow, the bank requires two things: my original thumbprint, and the encrypted private key Daniel had embedded into his daughter’s arm."
"You knew Isabella was alive," Nicholas said, keeping his voice level, waiting for the water ripples to settle so he could calculate his shot.
"Of course I knew," Victor sneered. "Who do you think let her out of the clinic in Zurich? Isabella is a tool, Nicky. She thinks she's the avenging angel, but she’s just the hound that brought Daniel’s girl straight back to my doorstep."
Nicholas’s heart went ice-cold. *She lied.*
"She told me you traded her brother," Nicholas said, his eyes narrowing.
"Her brother was a junkie who owed eight hundred thousand to the Lucchese," Victor said, shaking his head with genuine disgust. "Isabella killed him herself in 1982. She blamed me because she couldn't live with the blood on her own hands. She’s been working with me since Tuesday, Nicky. Why do you think Arthur Bell was dead before you got to the cellar? Do you really think an old man like me could slip past your security team alone?"
From behind Nicholas, the sound of water splashing softly in the dark tunnel signaled a presence.
Nicholas didn't turn around. He didn't need to.
The cold, round circle of a small-caliber muzzle pressed firmly against the base of his skull.
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"I told you, Nicky," Isabella’s voice whispered from the dark behind him, close and sweet against his ear. "You always were too quick to believe what the ledgers told you."
***
