Chapter 5 - The Pages of the Past
The fire in the stone hearth crackled, casting dancing orange shadows across the cedar beams of the master suite.
Damon sat in the leather armchair for over two hours, turning page after page of Elena’s diary, while Maya curled up on the rug beside the Warden, her head pillowed against the dog’s massive, warm side. The beast didn't move a muscle, breathing in slow, rhythmic sync with the sleeping child.
The diary wasn't a personal journal. It wasn't a collection of emotional grievances or romantic musings.
It was a ledger.
Page after page detailed the real history of the Castellano empire—not the clean, corporate venture capital and luxury real estate empire Damon had engineered, but the raw, brutal foundation of shell companies, political payoffs, and offshore accounts that his grandfather had built and that Damon had systematically consolidated.
And right there, written in Elena’s precise ink on page forty-two, was a name Damon hadn't heard in fifteen years.
Vince Castellano didn't die of a heart attack in 2018. Damon stopped breathing. The fire in the hearth seemed to hiss, the sound magnifying in the silent room.
He was poisoned, Elena had written. And the order didn't come from a rival family. It came from the inside. The board wants the legitimate front, but they want the old money back. They’re using Julian Vance to restructure the offshore trusts.
Damon’s hand tightened on the paper until the corner threatened to tear.
Julian Vance.
His chief legal counsel. The man who had sat across from him in the observation room just hours ago, advising him on how to handle the legal liability of a seven-year-old girl. The man who had managed the Castellano family trust for twenty-two years.
Damon slowly raised his eyes from the page.
Across the room, the heavy oak door of the master suite was shut tight. But beneath the gap at the bottom, a thin line of orange light flickered.
Damon didn't panic. Panic was for men who didn't know how to calculate odds. He set the diary down gently on the arm of the chair, stood up with absolute, measured calm, and reached inside his jacket for his Sig Sauer P365.
May you like
He didn't make a sound as he walked across the herringbone floor toward the door.
He reached the handle, turned it an inch—and found it locked from the outside.
