Send the Ugly One, He’ll Reject Her! They Laughed — But the Mafia Boss Was Speechless!
Chapter Six — The Compound
The compound was called Vescari, though nobody said the name out loud except the lawyers.
It sat in the deep fold of the Berkshires, up a road that stopped being a road and became a lane and then a promise, and it was less a house than an argument: three stories of dark Gothic stone with slate gables, window after window of black glass, and a wall around the whole thing — nine feet of dressed granite topped with wrought iron spikes that had been planted, Maren suspected, not to keep people out but to make it absolutely clear to anyone approaching what kind of people lived inside.
The car reached the gate at eleven-forty. Two men in dark rain-slick coats looked into the back seat at her through the glass, and one of them ran a light across the car’s flank, and then the gate swung and they were through.
The grounds were manicured in that specific way that money does when it wants to prove it has time. Long gravel, clipped hedges, a fountain that was running even in the rain and looked faintly ridiculous doing it. Lights burned in a few windows. Beyond the house, black trees rose up the mountainside into more black.
Maren watched it all and felt her pulse come up under her jaw — not fear, not quite, but something older and lower: the animal sense of a room she did not know the door of. Every instinct screamed at her to run, she thought, and it was almost funny, because she was strapped into a moving car at midnight in the middle of a private mountain, and running was a thing that happened to other people in other books.
At the portico, the door was opened before the car had fully stopped.
The man who opened it was enormous — six and a half feet, shoulders like a doorframe, a nose that had been broken at least twice and had settled into a shape like a fist. He looked at her the way a man looks at an invoice.
“Out,” he said.
Maren got out into the rain.
It came down cold and straight, and the olive dress wet through in seconds and hung heavier on her, and she stood in the gravel with the satchel against her chest and her glasses fogging, and the great stone face of the house looked down at her with all its black windows. Above, through the rain, a security camera on the eave turned its head very slightly to follow her.
“The boss is in the study,” the big man said. “You’ll come in.”
He walked her up the wide wet steps and through doors of oak so thick they made a sound like a bank vault when they closed, and they stepped into a foyer that hit her like an open palm: beeswax and old wood, cold stone, and under all of it, faint, expensive and clean, the smell of gun oil.
Candlelight. The floor was black-and-white marble, laid in a pattern like a chessboard, and there was a painting at the stair — an old one, a man with a white mustache and a face like a butler’s nightmare — and Maren’s mind, which never stopped, registered it: ancestor portrait, Italian school, probably late nineteenth, hanging where family portraits hang, look up at him and then work out what he cost. She made herself stop. She was standing in her father’s worst decision, in a wet green dress, at midnight, waiting to be looked at.
The big man patted her down — brisk, indifferent, hands along her ribs and waist and ankles — and took the satchel from her without asking. He turned it over once, unimpressed, and set it on a side table.
“Wait here.”
He walked off down a long, dim hall toward a pair of heavy doors at the far end, and his footsteps went away, and the foyer got very quiet, and Maren stood alone on the chessboard floor in her wet dress with her glasses steaming up and her heart slamming against her ribs like a bird in a jar.
She counted her breaths. She counted the ticks of a clock somewhere behind her. She watched the steam clear off her lenses and the foyer resolve into detail: the cold green of a marble vase, the sheen of the floor, the small ancient chips in the stair rail worn there by generations of hands going up and coming down.
A house wears its history in the places people touch, and this house had been touched by hands that did not hesitate.
She had known, before, in the abstract. Now she felt it in the soles of her wet shoes.
The doors at the end of the hall opened.
“Jones,” a voice said — low, baritone, unhurried, and it carried down the whole length of the corridor without effort, the way a low note carries. “You’re late.”
Maren Ashcroft picked up her satchel, and walked down the hall to meet the man her family had sold her to.