Chapter 5 - What Leo Heard at Midnight
Carmine slept on the floor beside Leo’s bed that night.
He did not plan to.
Leo woke at 1:17 screaming.
By 1:25, Carmine was sitting against the wall with a blanket over both of them.
“You can go back to your room,” Leo whispered.
“So can you.”
“This is my room now.”
“Then I guess I’m stuck.”
Leo considered that.
“Daddy?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you going to kill Helena?”
The question hit harder than Carmine expected.
“No.”
Leo stared at him.
“You kill bad people.”
Carmine had spent years making sure his son never saw the ugliest parts of his life.
Children still learned from silence.
“I have done things I’m not proud of,” he said carefully. “But hurting Helena would not fix what she did to you.”
“What will?”
“Truth. Doctors. Lawyers. People who are supposed to protect kids.”
Leo frowned.
“That sounds slower.”
Carmine almost smiled.
“It is.”
“Bad guys like slow?”
“No.”
“Then maybe slow is good.”
Carmine looked at his son.
Seven years old.
Already smarter than half the men who worked for him.
Leo rested his head against Carmine’s arm.
A few minutes passed.
Then he said, “Uncle Sal came here when you were gone.”
Carmine went still.
“When?”
“Lots.”
“Did Helena know?”
“She opened the side gate.”
“What did he do?”
“They talked in Mommy’s room.”
Carmine had kept Alessia’s old dressing room locked since her death.
“Did you hear anything?”
Leo nodded.
“I was in the vent.”
“The what?”
“There’s a big vent behind the toy shelves. Marco showed me when I was little. He said people used it to fix pipes.”
Carmine made a mental note to have a long conversation with Marco.
“What did you hear?”
Leo’s voice became small.
“Helena said, ‘If Carmine finds the second ledger, he’ll know.’”
Carmine’s pulse changed.
“What did Sal say?”
“He said, ‘The boy doesn’t know where she put it.’”
“Anything else?”
Leo squeezed the blanket.
“He said Mommy was smarter than both of them.”
Carmine stared at the dark window.
Alessia had kept a second ledger.
The hidden audit in Garage 4 was only the first.
“Did they say where it was?”
Leo nodded.
“Helena said she looked everywhere except the chapel because you never let anybody move Mommy’s candle.”
Carmine stood.
The estate chapel had been built by his grandfather.
After Alessia died, Carmine placed a brass candleholder beneath a small stained-glass window and never allowed staff to touch it.
Not sentiment.
Guilt.
Alessia had asked him to meet her there the night before she died.
He had been too busy.
At two in the morning, Carmine removed the candleholder.
Beneath it was a narrow brass cylinder.
Inside was a microSD card wrapped in wax paper.
Nina’s digital specialist opened the files thirty minutes later.
The second ledger was not about stolen money.
It contained audio recordings.
Photographs.
Shipping manifests.
And a video Alessia had recorded forty-eight hours before her death.
Carmine pressed play.
His wife appeared on the screen, exhausted and frightened.
“Carmine, if you are watching this, Salvatore already knows I found the accounts.”
She looked directly into the camera.
“But Sal is not the person I am most afraid of.”
The video froze.
Then a second file opened automatically.
Its label contained a name Carmine had not expected to see.
MARCO BELL.
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