Chapter 15 - The Framed Photograph
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A single silenced gunshot echoed against the stone walls of the wine cellar.
Lucian lowered his weapon, stepped over the lifeless chair, and headed up the basement stairs three at a time with Roman right on his heels.
"Call Enzo and the four remaining capos back to the estate immediately," Lucian barked as he burst through the heavy oak door into the main corridor, checking his watch: 9:42 AM. "Tell them Don Lorenzo Bellini ordered my father’s murder ten years ago and he’s in Chicago with a New York hit squad. Anyone who wants to keep their territory brings every armed soldier they have to Lake Forest within thirty minutes!"
"On it, Boss!" Roman shouted into his radio as he sprinted toward the armory to distribute heavy rifles to the estate guards.
Lucian didn't go to the armory. He went straight to the sunlit conservatory where Clara was sitting by the glass fountain, her hands wrapped around a porcelain teacup.
The moment she saw Lucian’s face in the doorway—pale, lethal, and charged with an urgency she had never seen in him before—she set the cup down and stood up.
"Lucian? What happened downstairs?"
"Where is your suitcase?" Lucian asked, crossing the room in four long strides and taking her by the shoulders. "The black leather one Roman brought back from the train."
"Roman had one of the guards bring it down from the car five minutes ago—it's sitting right by the hall closet," Clara said, her brow furrowing in confusion. "Why? What did Victor say?"
"The silver picture frame that used to sit on your nightstand," Lucian said, his eyes searching hers intensely. "The photograph of your father. Did you pack it inside that suitcase yesterday?"
"Yes, wrapped in my blue cashmere scarf at the bottom," she replied, hurrying with him out into the foyer and kneeling beside the small black suitcase. She unzipped the main compartment, pushed aside her neatly folded sweaters, and unwrapped the soft blue wool to reveal an eight-by-ten sterling silver frame.
She handed it up to Lucian.
Inside the glass was a faded color photograph taken twenty years ago. It showed a kind-faced man with warm hazel eyes—Clara’s eyes—standing on a wooden dock in front of a white cedar lake house surrounded by birch trees, holding a four-year-old Clara on his shoulders.
The moment Lucian looked at the background of the photograph, his breath stopped in his throat.
He knew that wooden dock. He knew the exact crooked birch tree leaning over the water and the green shutters on the second-floor gable.
"That's Harbor Springs, Michigan," Lucian whispered, his thumb tracing the glass over the white lake house. "That was my mother’s private summer cottage before I was born. She sold it under a blind trust when I was six years old."
"What?" Clara stared up at him, her heart pounding. "My father told me that was a cabin he rented the summer after my mother died! Lucian, how could my father have been at your mother’s cottage?"
Without answering, Lucian flipped the silver frame over in his large hands. The velvet backing was sealed shut not with ordinary metal tabs, but with thin rosin wax concealed beneath the felt border—an old smuggler’s trick used in the 1990s.
Using the steel blade of his pocketknife, Lucian sliced cleanly along the inside seam of the velvet backing and peeled the stiff cardboard open.
Taped flat against the inside of the wooden frame, hidden behind her father’s smiling face for ten long years, were two objects: a flat titanium micro-drive and a small, notched gold safe-deposit key stamped with the crest of the Northern Trust Vault in downtown Chicago.
Across the white tape holding them in place, written in faded blue ink by her father’s hand, were five words:
For Lucian Sterling—Forgive me.
Clara covered her mouth with both hands, a sob catching in her throat as Lucian told her in sixty rapid, brutal seconds what Victor had confessed in the cellar—how her father had been Eleanor Sterling’s loyal trust officer, how he had hidden the evidence of her parents' assassination, and how Victor and Don Lorenzo had slowly poisoned his shop water to force the key from him before using her as a pawn.
Before Clara could even process the devastating truth that her father had died protecting Lucian’s family secret, a deafening explosion rocked the front gates of the estate three hundred yards down the drive.
May you like
BOOM!
The crystal chandelier in the foyer swung violently overhead, showering dust across the marble floor as gunfire erupted across the snow-covered grounds outside.
