Chapter 7 - The Ledger of the Red Sparrow
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Slowly, Jade looked down at her left arm. Now that they were behind three inches of bulletproof glass and steel doors, the throbbing burn in her tricep finally registered.
Keeping her right hand free, she slipped out of the wet denim jacket, laid the taped olive-oil tin right on her lap where her hand could reach it, and climbed onto the leather barstool at the kitchen island.
Beneath her jacket, she wore only her short-sleeved diner blouse, torn at the shoulder and stained with rain and coffee.
Enzo stepped around the island, rolled up the sleeves of his crisp white dress shirt over his heavily muscled forearms—marked with a faded tribal scar along his left radius and a gunmetal Patek Philippe on his wrist—and poured antiseptic onto a sterile gauze pad.
When his warm fingers closed around her bare shoulder to steady her arm, Jade stiffened automatically. Nobody had touched her without violence in eighteen years—not in the Catskills, not in the foster homes, and not in the dark alleys of South Boston.
Enzo felt her flinch. He didn't tighten his grip; instead, he lightened his touch until his thumb rested barely against her skin, cleaning the shallow shrapnel graze with surprising, practiced gentleness before closing it with four sterile butterfly strips.
"You didn't even blink," Enzo murmured, standing six inches from her knees as he smoothed the last strip down over her pale skin. His dark eyes lifted to hers, close enough that she could see the lighter rings of silver around his pupils. "Who taught an eight-year-old girl how to take lead without making a sound?"
"Grigori Volkov used to put an ice cube in our palms and hold a lit cigarette an inch underneath our wrists during dinner," Jade said, her voice flat and distant as she stared at the top button of Enzo’s shirt. "If you dropped the ice or made a sound, the kid sitting next to you didn't eat for three days. You learn pretty fast that pain is just noise."
A muscle jumped hard in Enzo’s jaw. His hand lingered on her bare arm for a second longer than necessary, the heat of his palm sinking straight into her chilled bones, before he stepped back and picked up a tactical utility knife to slice the eighteen-year-old black electrical tape off the olive-oil tin.
"Show me what you took from his safe the night you burned the house down," Enzo said quietly.
Jade pried the rusted tin lid off.
Inside, wrapped in oiled parchment paper to keep out moisture, wasn't an electronic flash drive—in 2008, Grigori Volkov hadn't trusted computers with his deepest secrets.
Instead, there was a small, black leather pocket notebook written in tiny, meticulous Russian Cyrillic script, alongside six 35mm photographic negatives and a solid gold signet ring covered in dried, eighteen-year-old brown blood—a ring that had been cut off someone’s finger.
Enzo’s eyes dropped to the bloody gold signet ring lying on the marble counter.
Suddenly, the air in the penthouse turned so cold Jade felt the hair on her arms stand up.
Enzo reached out with two fingers and picked up the heavy gold ring—which was stamped with the crest of a crowned falcon holding an olive branch.
The personal family ring of the Moretti patriarchs.
"Where did you get my uncle’s ring?" Enzo whispered, his baritone dropping into a terrifying, lethal vibration that made the crystal glasses on the bar seem to hum.
Jade blinked, staring at the ring in his hand. "Your uncle?"
"In October 2008, my father’s younger brother—my Uncle Marco—went to a peace sit-down near Albany with the heads of the New York and Boston families," Enzo said, his eyes burning like twin coals in a pale face. "He never came back. My father received word that Grigori Volkov had ambushed Marco’s car on the Thruway. That was why my father tipped off the FBI to raid Volkov’s Catskills compound two days later!"
"Grigori didn't ambush that man on the highway," Jade said slowly, her memory flashing back eighteen years through the smoke and blood of that freezing October night in the Catskills. "Wait—I remember the night before I burned the house down! I was hiding in the dumbwaiter shaft behind Grigori’s study because I had stolen a piece of bread from the kitchen. A man with that gold ring on his finger wasn't brought in tied up—he walked into Grigori’s office Drinking cognac with another Italian man from Boston!"
Enzo froze. "Another Italian man from Boston?"
"Yes! And then the other Italian man shot the man wearing that ring in the back of the head right in front of Grigori," Jade said, pointing to the black leather notebook and the 35mm negatives on the counter, "and paid Grigori Volkov two million dollars to dispose of the body in the compound furnace and take the blame so your father would go to war with the Russians instead of looking inside his own house!"
With hands like iron, Enzo snatched up the strip of 35mm negatives and held them up against the bright LED light under the kitchen range hood.
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In the tiny negative frame from October 2008—taken by Grigori Volkov’s hidden study camera as insurance—stood a man holding a smoking pistol behind Uncle Marco’s chair.
It was Don Salvatore Bellini—Enzo’s godfather, his late father’s consigliere, and the sixty-five-year-old patriarch who currently sat at the head of the Boston Commission table alongside Enzo!
