Page 84 of Crowned in Sin
He exhales through his nose, long and unhappy, but he doesn't turn the car around. "You're gonna owe me for this."
"I know that most of all."
He parks half a block down from the house, engine idling, and looks at it through the windshield like it might do something. It's smaller than I remember, siding gone gray, the porch step still cracked in the same spot it's been cracked since I was nine.
"I'll wait here," he says. "You go in, you do your thing, you come out. Anybody so much as looks at this street wrong, I'm coming in after you, cover story or not."
"Deal."
"And Lydia." He catches my wrist before I open the door, gentle, nothing like Frank's grip in that photo. "Whatever this is. It's not just about him, is it?"
I look at him, and for a second I consider telling him everything. The photos. The videos he's threatening. The safe. All of it.
"It's not," I say instead. True enough not to feel like a lie.
He lets me go.
The key still works, which surprises me more than it should. The house smells like dust and old carpet and, underneath that, something that might be my father's aftershave thirteen years gone or might just be my memory playing tricks. I move through the front hall fast, past the water-stained wallpaper, into the den where his desk still sits shoved against the far wall like nobody ever had the heart to sell it.
The safe is where it's always been, bolted into the floor of the closet behind a false panel Frank never found, because Frank never had the patience to actually look.
My hands are steady on the dial. That surprises me too.
1... 4... 3.
The number my father used to scrawl inside my lunchbox notes when I was small, instead of writing the words out. I love you, folded into three digits, a private joke between the two of us that outlived him by over a decade and that I haven't let myself thinkabout in years, because thinking about it hurts in a place I don't visit on purpose.
The lock gives with a heavy click.
Inside, there's less than I expected. A stack of papers gone soft at the edges, an old watch, a folder with my father's accounting firm letterhead on it. I pull the folder out and my hands are less steady now, flipping through pages of incorporation filings, formation documents, a business registered under a name I recognize instantly because I've walked through its doors.
Terminal 7.
My father's accounting firm handled the books for the formation. His signature is on half these pages, careful cursive, a young accountant's handwriting before life wore it down into something faster and messier.
And there, on the engagement letter, the name of the man who brought him in for the work in the first place.
Vincent D'Ambrosio.
I stand there in a closet that smells like mothballs and hold my father's handwriting in one hand, and something in my chest starts moving before my brain catches up to it.
I think of what Martina told me in that garden in Italy, that Nico was forced to kill a man at eleven. He was eleven. He didn't have a choice.
Eleven.
I was eleven when my father died.
My father, who did the books for the D'Ambrosio family. My father, who dealt directly with Vincent, whose younger brother,Nico, was already deep in the business by then, old enough by their world's twisted math to have already been asked to prove himself.
The two facts sit next to each other in my head, close enough to touch, and I don't want to let them.
Nico might have killed my father.
The thought doesn't crash into me. It settles, quiet and complete.
I don't cry. I don't make a sound. I stand very still in a dead man's closet holding proof that the two most important men in my life were connected long before I ever walked into that club, and I let the horror sink into my bones one slow inch at a time.
I photograph every page. My hands are careful now, steadier than shaking would have been, and that scares me more.
