Chapter 15 - Interrogation and Ashes
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Within ten minutes, the festive music and champagne of the christening reception had vanished as two hundred terrified guests were ushered out the front gates by armed guards.
Upstairs in the master bedroom, behind triple-locked steel shutters and four hand-picked guards led by Dante’s most loyal enforcer, a pediatric toxicologist examined baby Leo and confirmed the infant had only been exposed to a tiny trace of inhalant sedative on the blanket—already completely out of his system now that he was wide awake and nursing hungrily in Tessa’s arms.
Down in the stone cellar beneath the estate’s private boathouse at the edge of the lake, the air smelled of damp moss, salt, and copper.
Dante didn't bother taking off his bespoke christening suit jacket. He stood over the iron chair where the fake nurse sat bound with steel chains, a tourniquet tied brutally tight above her shattered right knee.
Ten feet away, behind a locked iron grate separating the two halves of the cellar, Uncle Corrado and Sofia Rossi stood under the barrels of two submachine guns. Sofia’s white silk dress was stained with spilled red wine from when Nico’s men had dragged her out of the dining room, and her mascara was running in black rivers down her pale face.
"You only have to answer two questions," Dante told the bleeding woman in the chair, holding up the burner phone Nico had pulled from her pocket. "And since the last number dialed on this phone belongs to an encrypted relay in Brooklyn registered to the Rossi shipping company, you already know I have the first half. Who hired you, and what were your orders once you reached the service tunnel?"
The woman spat blood onto the stone floor, her teeth chattering from shock and blood loss. "Screw you, Castellano."
Dante didn't raise his voice. He simply reached down and twisted the wooden windlass of the tourniquet above her shattered kneecap by half an inch.
The woman let out a raw, earsplitting scream that bounced off the concrete ceiling, causing Sofia Rossi behind the iron grate to shriek and cover her ears in terror.
"Wait! Wait, stop!" the assassin gasped, her head lolling back against the iron chair as sweat poured down her neck. "I'll talk! God, stop touching it! It was the old man and the girl behind the bars! Corrado paid me two hundred grand up front through a clinic broker in Queens!"
Behind the iron grate, Corrado slammed his silver cane against the bars, his face purple with fury. "She’s lying, Dante! She’s a hired gun trying to save her own skin by turning you against your own blood!"
"Keep talking," Dante ordered the woman softly, never taking his eyes off her face. "What were you supposed to do with my son?"
"Not take him for ransom," the woman panted, sobbing weakly. "The girl—Sofia—she gave me the potassium syringe herself at the church an hour ago! She told me to inject the mother in the nursery so it looked like postpartum heart failure from her preeclampsia last week, and then suffocate the baby in the crib and stage it like a murder-suicide by a crazy runaway girlfriend! That way your bloodline was wiped out clean and you’d have to marry into Brooklyn to keep the New York seats!"
A dead, suffocating silence fell over the boathouse cellar.
Even Nico and the hardened mafia soldiers standing by the walls looked toward Sofia and Corrado with sheer, unadulterated revulsion. Murdering a rival soldier on the street was business; murdering a newborn infant in his christening gown and framing his mother was an abomination that violated every code the underworld had ever known.
Slowly, Dante turned around and walked over to the iron grate.
Sofia dropped to her knees on the wet stone behind the bars, weeping hysterically and reaching her manicured hands through the iron toward Dante’s shoes.
"Dante, it wasn't me! It was your uncle’s idea!" Sofia screamed, throwing Corrado under the bus in a heartbeat. "Corrado told me you were weak! He’s the one who set up the whole thing from the very beginning—even back in November!"
Dante stopped dead in front of the bars. His dark eyes narrowed to razor slits.
"What did you just say about November?" Dante whispered.
"Tell him, or I will!" Sofia shrieked at the trembling old man beside her, before looking back up at Dante in desperate terror. "That night in November when you killed Julian Morello in the Charlestown garage! Corrado was Julian’s partner in the fentanyl bus ring! And when Corrado found out Julian was going to confess to you, Corrado had one of his men call Tessa’s school earlier that day and tip her off to watch your car that night—because he hoped she would follow you into the garage, get caught in the crossfire, or call the feds on you!"
Dante stared down at his uncle as eight months of agony locked together with chilling finality.
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Tessa hadn't followed him that rainy Thursday night by pure coincidence. Corrado had planted the seed of suspicion to lure her to the garage, hoping to destroy them both in one stroke.
"Nico," Dante said softly, pulling his pistol from his holster. "Open the gate. Only for Sofia. She goes back to her father in Brooklyn in a box so Don Rossi knows why I’m taking his piers tomorrow morning. As for my uncle... leave us alone for twenty minutes."
