Chapter 3 - The Ledger of the Living Dead
The name hit me with the force of an armored round directly to the sternum.
Marcus Vance.
He was not just my second-in-command,
he was the son of my father’s oldest associate,
a man who had sat at my dinner table every Christmas for fifteen years,
a man who had bled beside me in the alleyways of South Boston when the syndicate was under siege by rival syndicates from New York.
Marcus had control of our shipping docks in Charlestown,
he had the keys to the offshore accounts in Grand Cayman,
and he had sworn an oath of fealty on a silver crucifix when I took the mantle of the Duca family after my father’s funeral.
"Marcus did this to you?"
I asked,
my voice dropping so low it sounded like gravel grinding between tectonic plates.
Grace nodded once,
a spasm of agony tearing through her throat as she swallowed her own blood.
"He came...
three hours ago,"
she whispered,
clutching my arm with the desperate strength of a drowning soul.
"He had four men with him,
men in tactical vests,
speaking with thick Russian accents from the docks.
They didn't break down the doors,
Roman,
they had the digital security codes.
They had the keycards to the basement tunnels."
"How did he know about the wall?"
I demanded,
pressing the clean wad of gauze against the deep laceration over her ear,
feeling the warm pulse of blood slowing beneath the pressure.
"He found...
your father's personal journal,"
Grace gasped,
her eyes rolling toward the ceiling as she fought against the crushing weight of unconsciousness.
"Silas didn't keep it in the safe.
He hid it...
in the false flue of the infirmary fireplace.
Marcus tore the brickwork apart while two of his men held me down.
He read the dates,
he read the payments...
he realized that for seventeen years,
your father was draining twenty million dollars from the family trust to keep Elena alive in the shadows."
The puzzle pieces,
scattered across my entire adult life,
suddenly slammed together with sickening,
brutal clarity.
Seventeen years ago,
the Duca syndicate had faced a federal racketeering indictment that would have dismantled three generations of power and sent every captain to a maximum-security penitentiary for life.
The key witness for the Department of Justice was supposed to be my mother,
Elena,
who had threatened to take her family's legitimate shipping assets and hand over Silas's financial books to the prosecutors to save me from the life of crime my father had carved out for my future.
Silas had told the world she drowned.
He had held an empty casket funeral,
crying tears of pure,
rehearsed venom before five hundred mourners,
while in reality,
he had drugged her,
dragged her into the reinforced vault behind his study,
and locked her away like an animal in a subterranean cage.
He couldn't kill her,
because the family trust required her biometric signature and her bloodline authorization to release the hundreds of millions sitting in Swiss holding accounts every ten years.
So he had kept her alive,
using Grace Harper,
the destitute daughter of a disgraced dockworker,
as her jailer and her lifeline.
"Why didn't you come to me,
Grace?"
I asked,
the rage in my chest burning with a cold,
hollow agony.
"You watched me mourn that woman for seventeen years.
You watched me leave fresh white lilies on an empty marble tomb every single Sunday of my life.
Why did you stay silent?"
Grace wept,
the tears washing thin,
pale tracks through the dried blood on her cheeks.
"Because your father told me...
that if I ever whispered a single syllable to you,
he would take Mia and her baby sister...
and put them in the bottom of Boston Harbor,"
she cried,
her breath hitching in her bruised ribs.
"He owned the police,
Roman!
He owned the judges,
he owned the streets,
and you were his son!
You had his cold eyes,
you had his ruthless hands,
how could I possibly know you weren't the monster he was?"
Her words struck me harder than any fist,
stripping away the veneer of power and control I had spent my entire life constructing.
She was right.
In the streets of Boston,
the name Roman Duca did not inspire hope;
it inspired absolute,
uncompromising fear.
I had built an empire on silence,
on retribution,
and on violence so calculated that no man ever dared cross the perimeter of my estate without permission.
To a terrified mother trying to protect her daughters,
I was just another beast waiting in the upper rooms of the castle.
"Look at me,
Grace,"
I commanded,
my voice softening,
stripping away the ice until only the raw,
unadorned truth remained.
She blinked,
turning her bloodshot eyes toward mine.
"Your daughters are alive,"
I said,
holding her gaze with an intensity that brooked no doubt.
"Mia cleaned my desk tonight because she thought one speck of dust would make me throw you out into the winter rain.
She carried Lily on her back like a shield.
I swear to you,
on the soul of the mother I thought was dead,
no one will ever touch your children again.
Marcus Vance will not live to see the dawn,
and this house will burn to the foundation before I let them harm a single hair on their heads."
Grace let out a ragged breath,
her body relaxing slightly against the cold vinyl of the chair,
as if a crushing weight she had carried for nearly a decade had finally been lifted from her broken shoulders.
"The ledger..."
she whispered,
pointing a trembling,
bruised finger toward the corner of the room,
where an antique brass medicine cabinet hung crookedly on the wall.
"Marcus took the bonds...
he took the bearer certificates...
but he dropped the black notebook behind the heating grate.
It contains...
the names of every man he bribed in the police department,
the offshore account numbers,
and the shipping manifests for the weapons arriving at Pier Forty-Nine tonight.
If he gets those manifests...
he takes the entire city."
I stood up,
walked to the heating grate beneath the cabinet,
and ripped the metal cover off with a single jerk of my arm.
There,
tucked into the dark space beside the dusty radiator pipes,
lay a small,
leather-bound book with a gold Duca crest stamped into the cover.
I pulled it out,
flipping through the dense,
handwritten pages filled with my father's familiar,
spidery handwriting.
It was all there.
Seventeen years of corruption,
extortion,
and betrayal.
And on the final page,
written in fresh blue ink that was barely dry,
was Marcus Vance's signature beneath a transfer of seventy million dollars from the Duca maritime holding firm to an entity registered in St.
Petersburg.
Suddenly,
a sharp,
high-pitched beep echoed through the silent infirmary.
I looked down at the tactical watch on my wrist.
The estate’s perimeter security system had just suffered a catastrophic voltage drop.
Three red lights flashed on the digital display.
Camera four:
dead.
Camera seven:
dead.
The main gate power grid:
severed.
From the floor below,
drifting up through the air ducts of the cavernous mansion,
came the distinct,
May you like
heavy thud of tactical boots breaching the heavy glass of the conservatory terrace.
They were inside.
