Chapter 18 - Shadows in the Rose Bed
Rain began to fall, tapping against the high glass windows of the grand salon like tapping fingers.
Gabriel moved without a sound. He had taken off his leather boots, walking in heavy wool socks across the parquet floors. He knew every loose board, every drafty pocket of air that could betray a footprint.
Through the tall arched French doors of the terrace, he saw the shadow cross the stone balustrade.
Leo Moretti was fifty, built like an iron piling, with a scarred neck and a crooked nose from his days in the South Boston bare-knuckle circuits. He didn't carry a submachine gun; he carried a heavy .45 revolver equipped with an improvised rubber suppressor. He moved with the casual, heavy stride of a butcher who had worked the slaughterhouse floor so long that blood held no novelty.
Moretti stepped through the open patio door, the wet soles of his work boots leaving greasy smudges on the white marble.
"Gabriel," Moretti’s voice rumbled through the quiet salon, deep and phlegmatic. "Don't bother playing hide-and-seek in your own living room. I know you're in here."
Gabriel stood behind the fluted marble column near the grand piano, his pistol raised, his breathing perfectly flat.
"Dominic wants the second ledger, Marlowe," Moretti said, casually running the barrel of his revolver along the edge of a mahogany credenza. "Give me the account numbers for the Swiss trust in Zurich, and I walk out of here. Dominic leaves the country tonight. You keep the kid. You keep the house. We call it an even trade."
"You killed my wife, Leo," Gabriel said. His voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, echoing softly off the thirty-foot ceiling.
Moretti chuckled, a dry, rattling sound. "Claire was a sweet girl, Gabriel. Too good for a harbor shark like you. But she stuck her nose into a shipment of Turkish assault rifles that didn't belong to her. She thought she was saving the city. All she did was buy herself a six-foot plot in Cambridge."
Moretti took another step, his boots squeaking on the marble.
"And that boy of yours," Moretti added, his voice dropping into a cruel, leisurely drawl. "I saw him at the dock today through my binoculars. Nice walking stick he's got. Shrapnel does funny things to a spine, doesn't it? He should've died in the backseat with his mother. Would've saved you a lot of doctor bills."
Gabriel didn't shout. He didn't let rage cloud his sight picture.
He waited for Moretti to cross the seam between the Persian rug and the open floor—the exact spot where the afternoon sun had left a slick patch of damp salt from Hannah’s boots earlier that morning.
Moretti took the step.
His right heel slid half an inch on the damp wood. His balance shifted by a fraction of a second.
Gabriel stepped out from behind the pillar.
"You should've stayed in jail, Leo," Gabriel whispered.
Moretti whipped his revolver around, but Gabriel was already moving. Gabriel didn't fire his weapon—he closed the distance in two lunging strides, slamming his left forearm against Moretti’s wrist, driving the revolver upward toward the ceiling.
Crack.
The suppressed round blew a hole through the antique plaster cornice, showering white dust over both men.
Gabriel drove the butt of his pistol directly into Moretti’s jaw.
Bone cracked with a sickening snap. Moretti roared, headbutting Gabriel squarely in the bridge of the nose. Pain exploded across Gabriel’s vision, warm blood instantly flooding his mouth, but he didn't give an inch. He hooked his leg behind Moretti’s knee, leveraging all his weight, and slammed the giant onto the hard marble floor.
The heavy revolver skittered across the room, stopping against the stone hearth.
Moretti rolled over, spitting blood, his hand reaching inside his jacket for a folding steel blade. "I'll carve your throat out, Marlowe—"
A heavy, metallic thud cut him short.
Moretti’s head jerked sideways. His eyes rolled up, and his massive frame went limp against the floorboards.
Standing over him, her chest heaving, was Hannah Cole.
In her hands, she gripped the heavy iron fire poker from the library hearth, its black wrought-iron tip dented from the blow. Her dark hair was wild, her eyes cold and merciless as an ocean squall.
Beside her stood Eli.
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The boy was leaning hard on his ash cane, his small knuckles white, but he wasn't crying. In his other hand, he held his mother’s carved wooden sailboat, held like a shield against his chest.
"I told you," Hannah said, her breath rasping through the silence of the room. "Nobody breaks the locks in this house again."
