This estate had belonged to the Vale family for nearly a century. He knew its rooms, its hidden safes, its escape corridors. His grandfather had built half of them during Prohibition.
But this wall had been sealed recently.
“What’s behind there?” Dominic asked.
Nathan went pale.
That, more than any confession, answered him.
Dominic nodded to Marcus.
“Open it.”
Marcus pulled a crowbar from the emergency rack and drove it between the stones. The mortar cracked. Dust fell in gray sheets. He struck again, then again, until a section of the wall gave way with a hollow groan.
Behind it was not solid earth.
It was a narrow iron door.
Old. Rusted. Hidden.
A small keypad had been mounted beside it, wired through the stone with fresh black cable.
Dominic looked at Nathan.
Nathan said nothing.
Dominic hit him so hard Nathan stumbled against the wine rack, bottles exploding around his shoulders. Red wine spilled down his white shirt like blood.
“The code.”
Nathan spat pink onto the floor. “You don’t understand what you’re opening.”
Dominic stepped closer.
“The code.”
Nathan laughed through split lips. “Your father built secrets under this house, Dom. You think you inherited an empire? You inherited a grave.”
Dominic raised the pistol again.
Nathan gave him six numbers.
Dominic entered them.
For two seconds, nothing happened.
Then the iron door unlocked.
The air behind it was colder than the cellar. Not damp, but stale, as if it had been trapped for years beneath stone and money and silence. Dominic took a flashlight from Marcus and stepped through.
A narrow passage sloped downward.
On the walls, old brick gave way to poured concrete. The passage should not have existed. It ran beneath the cellar, beneath the foundation, deeper than any storage room or tunnel Dominic knew.
Nathan remained at the entrance, held at gunpoint by Marcus.
“Dom,” Nathan called after him, “don’t.”
Dominic kept walking.
The passage ended at a chamber.
Inside were metal cabinets. A desk. A cot. Old surveillance equipment. File boxes stacked in neat rows. It looked less like a hiding place than an office for a ghost.
On the desk sat a tape recorder.
Beside it was a photograph.
Dominic picked it up.
For a moment, the world narrowed.
His first wife, Elena, smiled back at him from fifteen years ago, young and sunlit, sitting on the stone steps outside the estate. Her hand rested on her pregnant belly.
Dominic had forgotten that picture existed.
The child had died with her.