Chapter 7 - Behind the Penthouse Doors
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"We’re moving you and your sister right now, Miss Harper," Marco said into his encrypted radio as four more of Julian’s security operatives arrived on the sixteenth floor within four minutes, locking down every stairwell and elevator access point to the oncology wing while hospital security cleared the floor under the cover story of a burst steam pipe. "Four of our guys stay right here inside your father’s room around the clock—nobody without Dr. Vance’s personal thumbprint gets on this floor. You and Lily come to the Park Avenue penthouse until the boss finds out who leaked the hospital transfer."
Twenty minutes later, an armored black Escalade carried Clara and a wide-eyed nineteen-year-old Lily straight into the subterranean private garage beneath the Vane Tower on Park Avenue and 61st Street.
While Lily was settled into a luxurious guest suite on the fifty-ninth floor—delighted to find a private library stocked with medical reference books and a kitchen chef who immediately brought her hot paninis and iced coffee—Dante escorted Clara up the interior marble staircase to the sixtieth-floor penthouse study.
The double doors stood open.
Inside the soaring, glass-walled corner office overlooking Central Park, Julian Vane stood behind his massive mahogany partner’s desk with his suit jacket off, his white sleeves rolled up over his scarred forearms, staring down at three accounting ledgers and the captured burner phone Marco had sent up from the hospital.
When Clara stepped across the threshold, Julian looked up instantly.
He didn't stay behind the desk. He crossed the thirty-foot Persian rug in five long strides, stopping right in front of her, his hands coming up to grasp her shoulders gently as his arctic-blue eyes scanned her from head to toe with fierce, unmasked intensity.
"Marco said the shooter got within twenty feet of you before you spotted his boots," Julian said, his voice a low, rough vibration that sent a jolt straight down her spine. "Are you hurt?"
"He didn't touch me," Clara said softly, looking up at him—so close she could see the faint silver scar along his right temple that had been hidden by his beanie the night before, and smell the crisp cedarwood and espresso on his skin. "Your guard Marco pushed me behind the elevator wall before the first shot went off. And my dad slept right through it."
Julian’s hands lingered on her shoulders for a heartbeat longer, his thumb brushing the collar of her blouse before he forced himself to step back half a pace, his jaw tightening into granite as he looked back at his desk.
"That shooter belonged to Lorenzo Morelli in Newark," Julian said coldly. "Which means between midnight last night—when I called Dr. Vance to arrange your father’s transfer—and eleven o’clock this morning, someone with access to my foundation’s private disbursement logs sold your name to Morelli for a bounty."
"Because Morelli thinks I’m someone important to you," Clara said quietly, walking over to the desk and looking down at the burner phone. "I’m sorry I brought a target onto your hospital foundation, Mr. Vane. If Lily and I go stay at a motel upstate under cash—"
"If you walk out of this building into a motel upstate, Morelli’s spotters at the bridges will have you in the back of a van before you pass Yonkers," Julian cut in sharply, turning on her with cold fire in his eyes. "And stop apologizing for a rat in my own house. You didn't put a target on yourself—I did, the moment I sent my personal car to Queens last night and used my foundation code at Sloan Kettering."
Wait.
Clara’s analytical mind—the same sharp eye that had spotted the Patek Philippe under his frayed sleeve and the concrete dust on the shooter’s boots—stopped on the words he had just spoken.
"Wait a second," Clara said slowly, looking at the three open ledgers on his desk. "Why did the shooter at the hospital have wet gray concrete dust on his combat boots at twelve o’clock today?"
Julian frowned slightly, glancing at Dante standing by the door. "Morelli runs construction companies in Jersey."
"It wasn't dry quarry dust from Jersey," Clara said, stepping closer to the desk as the memory of the kitchen hallway at Bellini’s Chophouse flashed clearly in her mind. "When you told me last night that you were closing Bellini’s Chophouse for two weeks to gut the kitchen and replace the booths... your contractor crew started tearing up the cracked marble floor in the restaurant foyer at seven o’clock this morning! Chef Mateo texted me a photo at nine a.m. thanking me for the promotion—and in the background of Mateo’s photo, there was a guy in a black leather jacket standing by the broken marble floor talking to old man Bellini’s lawyer!"
Julian went utterly still.
"Show me Mateo’s text," Julian commanded quietly.
Clara pulled out her phone, opened her messages from Chef Mateo, and handed it to Julian.
Julian zoomed in on the background of the sunny morning photograph inside the restaurant foyer. Standing beside the pile of jackhammered gray marble dust, talking quietly to Don Lorenzo Bellini’s longtime family consigliere, Consigliere Gallo, was the exact same man in black military boots whom Marco had shot in the shoulder at Sloan Kettering three hours later!
"Nobody inside your foundation leaked the hospital transfer, Julian," Clara breathed as Julian’s eyes turned to black ice. "When Richie Grasso got put on that boat to Sicily at dawn, he or the precinct captain called old man Bellini’s lawyer, Gallo! Gallo went to the restaurant at nine a.m., found out you were the one in booth six who took down Richie and promoted me, and Gallo hired Morelli’s gunman right there in the restaurant foyer to follow me to my dad’s hospital!"
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Julian looked up from the phone screen to Clara’s face, a slow, lethal admiration burning in his arctic-blue eyes.
"Dante," Julian said softly without taking his eyes off Clara. "Bring Consigliere Gallo to the basement warehouse at Pier 84 in thirty minutes. Tell him I want to go over the Bellini restaurant lease in person."
