Chapter 4 - The Safehouse In Queens
The rain started falling over the East River just as my yellow cab crossed the Queensboro Bridge.
I had switched taxis three times between Tribeca and Long Island City, paying each driver in crumpled cash and keeping my baseball cap pulled low.
Dante had surveillance cameras on every bridge, tunnel, and major avenue in Manhattan.
He owned the private security firms that monitored the subway stations and paid off half the beat cops in the southern precincts.
If a woman wanted to vanish from Dante Caruso’s radar, she could not use credit cards, luxury rideshares, or the homes of wealthy socialite friends.
Wealthy friends were the first people Dante would lean on with his silver-tongued threats and his armed goons.
The cab pulled up in front of an unassuming four-story brick apartment building in Sunnyside, Queens.
The street smelled of wet asphalt, roasting chicken from a nearby Peruvian bodega, and diesel exhaust.
It was loud, gritty, real, and entirely detached from the suffocating luxury of Park Avenue.
I carried my duffel bag up the narrow, dimly lit stairwell to the third floor, listening to the muffled sounds of televisions and crying babies behind closed doors.
I stopped at Apartment 3B and knocked three times, paused, and knocked twice more.
The deadbolt clicked open immediately.
Standing in the doorway was a tall woman in her early forties with sharp gray eyes, cropped auburn hair, and a cigarette held between manicured fingers.
Victoria Vance, my father’s estranged younger sister and the only member of my family who had refused to attend my wedding to Dante Caruso.
She looked at me from beneath her heavy bangs, her eyes drifting from my damp jacket down to the duffel bag in my grip.
“You’re eight years late for dinner, Elena,” Victoria said, stepping aside to let me pass.
I stepped into the warm, cluttered apartment filled with wall-to-wall filing cabinets, monitors, and the scent of strong espresso.
The door clicked shut behind me, followed by the slide of three heavy steel deadbolts.
I let the duffel bag drop to the linoleum floor and leaned back against the solid wood of the door, closing my eyes as a deep, shuddering breath racked my body.
“He said it in front of four hundred people,” I whispered, my voice breaking slightly for the first time since I walked out of the ballroom.
“He laughed with his men and told them I knew my place.”
Victoria snorted, walking over to the small kitchen counter to pour two mugs of black coffee.
“Men like Dante Caruso don't view women as human beings, Elena.
They view us as real estate.
They acquire us, renovate us to suit their tastes, and expect us to appreciate the roof over our heads while they go whoring around the neighborhood.”
She handed me a steaming mug, her gaze softening just enough to show the blood ties that connected us.
“Did you get the drive?”
I reached into my jacket and produced the titanium flash drive, placing it carefully on the laminate table beside a stack of legal briefs.
Victoria’s eyes widened slightly as she picked up the device, turning it over in the warm lamplight.
“Tell me you didn't leave your fingerprints on the safe.”
“I wiped the dial before I closed it,” I replied, sitting down at the kitchen table.
“And I took my father’s folder.”
Victoria’s face tightened instantly, the cigarette in her hand pausing halfway to her lips.
“The Vance Trust?”
“Yes.”
I unzipped the bag and pulled out the worn, yellowing folder, sliding it toward my aunt.
“All these years, Dante told me he stepped in to save my father’s shipping lines from bankruptcy.
He told me my father got in over his head with loan sharks from Brooklyn and that Dante paid off the debt as a favor to our family.”
Victoria let out a bitter, dry chuckle that held no humor whatsoever.
“Your father never borrowed a single dime from street thugs, Elena.
Julian Vance was stubborn, proud, and completely honest.
That was precisely why old Salvatore Caruso and his bastard son Dante had him eliminated.”
The room seemed to spin around me for a terrifying second.
The suspicion that had gnawed at the edges of my sanity for the last three years suddenly solidified into an unbearable truth.
“Eliminated?” I breathed, my fingers digging into the edge of the wooden table.
“Look at page twelve of that folder,” Victoria commanded, her voice dropping into a grave, clinical register.
I flipped through the brittle documents until my eyes landed on a faded notarized contract dated two days before my father was found dead in the harbor warehouse.
It was an asset transfer deed for Vance Maritime Logistics, transferring fifty-one percent of the deep-water docking rights at the Red Hook terminal to Caruso Atlantic Holdings.
The signature at the bottom bearing my father’s name was an obvious forgery.
The loops of the 'J' were too sharp, the slant of the 'V' entirely unnatural.
And right beneath the forgery, witnessed by an obscure notary public who had mysteriously died of a heart attack six months later, was the counter-signature of Dante Caruso.
“They stole the docks,” I whispered, nausea rising in my throat.
“They needed the deep-water berths to smuggle untraceable cargo into New York without going through federal customs,” Victoria explained, pulling up a series of financial spreadsheets on her laptop.
“Your father refused their bribes three times.
So Dante arranged a little meeting in an empty warehouse, forged his signature on the transfer deeds, and made it look like a tragic suicide caused by phantom financial ruin.”
I stared down at the forged signature, my chest heaving with an overwhelming surge of disgust and fury.
I had slept beside my father’s murderer for nearly three thousand nights.
I had kissed the lips that ordered his execution.
I had comforted the monster when he woke up sweating from his own bloody nightmares, whispering that he was a good man deep down.
“He didn't just insult me tonight, Victoria,” I said, my voice dropping so low it sounded like gravel scraping together.
“He destroyed eight years of my life built on a graveyard.”
Victoria leaned across the table, her sharp gray eyes boring into mine.
“Then what are we going to do about it, Elena?
Because if you run to California or change your name in Europe, Dante’s hounds will track you down within a year.
Men like him don't let their secrets walk away alive.”
I picked up the titanium flash drive and looked at my own reflection distorted in the dark laptop screen.
The docile, obedient mafia wife who wept in the backseat of a limousine was officially dead.
In her place stood Julian Vance’s daughter, armed with the law, the financial codes of the entire underworld, and a hatred that burned hotter than hell itself.
“We aren't running anywhere,” I said, looking up at Victoria with complete clarity.
“Dante thinks I am a decorative flower that will wither without his sunlight.
Tomorrow morning, we freeze his bank accounts, shut down his ports, and hand his empire over to the only people he fears more than God.”
Victoria smiled for the first time that night—a cold, vicious smile that mirrored my own.
“The Southern District of New York?”
“No,” I replied coldly, opening my burner phone to dial a number I had memorized five years ago.
May you like
“Carmine Moretti.
If Dante wants a war, I’m going to give him one on two fronts.”
