THE MAFIA BOSS'S DOG SHOWED NO MERCY UNTIL A LITTLE GIRL WHISPERED ONE NAME

The ringing came from overhead.

Not Damon's phone.

Not Diego's.

A cheap electronic chirp pulsed behind the plaster ceiling every four seconds.

Damon looked up.

"Kill power to this wing."

The lights died.

Emergency strips along the floor blinked red.

The ringing continued.

"Battery device," Diego said.

"Or someone wants us to think it is."

Damon pointed at two guards. "Get a ladder. No one touches the device until I see it."

Sophie stood beside Warden, shoulders rising and falling too quickly.

For the first time since she entered the estate, fear had reached her face.

She clicked the red hair clip against her thumbnail.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Pause.

Tap. Tap.

Warden leaned against her leg.

Damon noticed the dog's breathing slow.

"That pattern calms him," he said.

Sophie shook her head. "It tells him where home is."

The words hit harder than they should have.

"Who told you that?"

"Mom."

A guard returned with a folding ladder.

Diego climbed, cut through the acoustic panel, and reached into the cavity.

"Got something."

"Do not answer it."

Diego lowered a prepaid phone wrapped in gray duct tape.

The screen displayed one word.

SEVENTEEN.

The ringing stopped.

Damon's eyes moved to Mara's message.

The five numbers: 3 - 2 - 17 - 9 - 4.

Start with seventeen.

"Extension seventeen," Diego said.

Damon shook his head.

"We don't have an extension seventeen in this wing."

"Camera seventeen?"

"East fountain."

"Room seventeen?"

Damon looked toward the kennel door.

The estate had forty-two numbered service rooms on original architectural plans.

Except sixteen jumped directly to eighteen.

He had noticed the missing number years ago and assumed it had been absorbed during renovation.

His grandfather had hated wasted space.

His grandfather had also loved secrets.

"Get me the 1987 blueprints," Damon said.

Diego touched his earpiece.

Damon stopped him.

"No radio."

"Why?"

"Because whoever placed that phone knew exactly where we'd stand after the cabinet was opened. If our cameras are compromised, assume audio is too."

He looked at the guards.

"Phones in the sink. All of them."

No one argued.

Sophie watched grown men drop ten-thousand-dollar encrypted devices into a stainless steel dog-washing basin.

"Mom puts hers in the freezer," she said.

Damon looked at her.

"Why?"

"She says cold makes liars slow."

Diego raised an eyebrow.

"Your mother sounds exhausting."

"She doesn't like you."

Diego blinked. "We've never met."

"She said you smile before you say something mean."

Damon looked at Diego.

Diego was not smiling anymore.

There it was.

The obvious traitor.

Mara had warned him not to trust the obvious traitor.

Which meant somebody wanted suspicion to land on Diego.

Damon filed it away.

"Sophie, what did your mother tell you about coming here? Exact words."

The girl looked at Warden instead of Damon.

"She said take bus twelve to the last stop. Walk to the wall with ivy. Find the green door. If the dog comes, don't run. If the man with the quiet voice comes, give him the picture."

"And if I didn't come?"

Sophie rubbed Warden's ear.

"Then I was supposed to leave."

"Where?"

She shrugged.

"Anywhere."

Damon's mouth went dry.

Mara had sent her seven-year-old daughter into a fortified estate with no backup plan she was willing to tell the child.

That meant she had believed the alternative was worse.

A housekeeper named Teresa arrived with a rolled set of old plans under one arm.

She was sixty-two, had worked for the Castellanos since Damon was eleven, and treated armed men as inconvenient furniture.

"You took these from the archive last winter and never put them back," she said.

"Good afternoon to you too, Teresa."

"It is not good. There are guns in my courtyard."

"Technically my courtyard."

"You don't water the roses. It is my courtyard."

Sophie smiled for the first time since the gunshot.

Teresa saw her and stopped.

Then she saw Warden pressed against the child's hip.

The blueprint roll slipped from her hand.

"Madonna."

Damon watched her face carefully.

"You know her?"

"No."

Too fast.

Teresa bent for the plans.

Damon caught the paper before she did.

"Teresa."

She straightened.

"I said no."

"You recognized something."

Her eyes moved to Sophie's hair clip.

Red plastic.

Three taps.

Pause.

Two.

Teresa closed her eyes.

"I recognized a habit."

Damon felt the room tighten around him.

"Mara?"

Teresa nodded once.

"She used to tap a spoon against her coffee mug like that. Always when she was thinking. Three, then two. Drove your grandfather insane."

"You knew Mara before she trained Warden?"

"Everyone in the old house knew Mara. You just didn't know you knew her."

Damon unfolded the blueprints across a steel examination table.

"Explain."

Teresa looked at the guards.

"Not with an audience."

Damon dismissed them.

Diego stayed.

Teresa frowned.

"Him too."

"He stays."

She gave Damon a look that made him feel fourteen again.

"That certainty is why your family keeps burying people."

Then she leaned over the plan.

The 1987 estate layout was hand-annotated by Damon's grandfather, Carlo Castellano.

Most rooms had numbers and functions.

Sixteen: cold storage.

Eighteen: mechanical.

Between them was a blank rectangle built into the foundation wall.

No door.

No number.

But inside the rectangle, Carlo had written a single small mark in pencil.

17.

Damon traced the outline.

"How do you enter?"

Teresa looked at Sophie.

"You don't."

Sophie tapped her clip on the metal table.

Three. Pause. Two.

Teresa's face changed.

"Unless Mara taught the dog."

Damon rolled the plan.

"We're going downstairs."

Diego's phone buzzed in the sink despite the water.

All three adults turned.

The submerged screen glowed through two inches of water.

Incoming message.

UNKNOWN SENDER.

Damon lifted the phone out with metal forceps and read the preview.

YOU HAVE 31 MINUTES.

A second message arrived.

ASK TERESA WHAT SHE DID WITH YOUR FATHER'S SHOES.

Damon slowly turned his head.

Teresa had gone white.

Sophie stopped tapping.

Warden growled at the floor.

Damon noticed Sophie's free hand close around the edge of his coat. She did it without looking at him, as if borrowing stability from fabric was less embarrassing than asking for it.