Chapter 3 - The Interrogation
The private car was not a limousine. It was an armored Mercedes Maybach, painted matte obsidian, with windows four inches thick and tires reinforced with ballistic steel rings.
Gabe threw Luc into the trunk of a chase SUV idling in the alleyway, while Dominic ushered me into the back seat of the Maybach. The door closed with the heavy, pressurized *clunk* of a bank vault. Outside, the rain was coming down in violent sheets, turning the neon lights of Midtown Manhattan into smeared streaks of red and gold against the wet pavement.
Dominic sat across from me on the rear-facing leather bench. Between us was a small console that displayed encrypted digital readouts: satellite tracking, emergency communication frequencies, and live exterior camera feeds.
The car accelerated smoothly into the rainy night, heading south down Park Avenue.
"Drink," Dominic said.
He reached into the console, pulled out an unopened glass bottle of mineral water—still sealed in factory plastic—and handed it to me.
I took it, but my fingers were shaking so hard I couldn't break the plastic seal.
Without a word, Dominic took the bottle back from my hands, twisted the cap off with effortless ease, and handed it back to me. His skin brushed mine. His fingers were warm, dry, and rock-steady.
I took two massive gulps, the cold water burning my raw throat.
"Where are you taking me?" I demanded, finding my voice through the adrenaline shakes. "You said my family is in danger. What does Celeste have to do with my family? She doesn't even know who I am!"
"She knows your name," Dominic said flatly. "Your nametag was pinned to your chest. She heard me address you as Miss Bennett. Le Triomphe keeps employee rosters on a cloud-based human resources database. By now, her private investigators have pulled your personnel file, your social security number, your home address in Astoria, and your mother’s medical billing records from Mount Sinai."
The air left my lungs.
"Julian," I whispered, the terror clawing at my chest like wild talons. "My brother. He’s nineteen. He’s home alone studying for midterms—"
"Gabe dispatched an extraction team four minutes ago," Dominic interrupted. He pulled a black encrypted smartphone from his pocket, checked a screen, and turned it toward me.
On the screen was a live video feed from an unmarked black sedan idling outside a two-story brick row house on 31st Street in Astoria. Our house.
"Two operatives are outside your building," Dominic said. "They are armed with Class-3 suppressed carbines. If anyone approaches your front steps who isn't wearing a verified transponder, they will be neutralized before their foot touches the first step."
I stared at the screen. The familiar cracked pavement of our street, the drooping willow tree in Mrs. Gable’s front yard, the flickering streetlamp outside our living room window—all framed by the crosshairs of a billionaire’s private military apparatus.
"Who are you?" I whispered, looking up at him in the dim interior light of the car. "The papers call you a venture capitalist. A corporate restructuring titan. Men who buy shipping lines don't have military strike teams stationed in Queens."
A grim, humorless shadow crossed Dominic’s face.
"My family didn't start with corporate shipping, Miss Bennett. My grandfather moved olive oil out of Calabria in the 1950s. When you build an empire out of blood and concrete, you learn that the law is merely a polite suggestion written by men who don't have the stomach to hold what they take."
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, his face inches from mine.
"Now," he said, his voice dropping into an interrogation tone that made my spine go rigid. "Let’s talk about you."
"There is nothing to talk about! I'm a waitress!"
"A waitress who speaks fluent legal Italian," he countered. "A waitress who identifies an archaic Tuscan contractual loophole in four seconds while pouring sparkling water. A waitress who diagnoses potassium cyanide by the surface tension of a forty-year-old vintage."
He reached out, his forefinger catching my chin, tilting my face upward into the light. His touch was firm, impossible to resist, yet strangely careful.
"Who sent you, Mara?"
The use of my first name struck like an electric shock.
"Nobody sent me!" I said, my voice rising with desperate fury. "Check my bank accounts! Look at the overdraft fees! Look at the three credit cards maxed out to pay for my mother's chemotherapy! If I was a plant, do you think I would be living on stale bagels and wearing five-dollar thrift store shoes under this uniform?"
Dominic didn't let go of my chin. His eyes swept across my face, searching every micro-expression, every involuntary twitch of my pupils.
"A brilliant mind living in poverty is the most easily recruited weapon in the world," he whispered. "A hundred thousand dollars in an offshore account to spill a glass of water at the right moment. To distract me while the wine was poured. Or perhaps you were meant to stop the document signing, ensuring the conflict escalated into a physical confrontation where Luc could finish the job."
Furious, tears of rage burning behind my eyelids, I shoved his hand away from my chin.
"If I wanted you dead, Dominic Rinaldi, I would have kept my mouth shut!" I spat at him. "I would have stood there and watched you drink that Romanée-Conti! I would have watched you choke on your own blood on that marble floor, and then I would have collected my sixty-dollar tip and walked home!"
Dominic stared at me.
For five long, agonizing seconds, the only sound was the hum of the Maybach’s engine and the muffled drumming of rain against the reinforced glass roof.
Then, slowly, the tension in Dominic’s shoulders eased.
He leaned back against the leather seat, crossing his long legs.
"Fair point," he murmured.
"You're insane," I breathed, pressing my back against the door, my chest heaving. "You're completely paranoid."
"Paranoia is the only reason I am thirty-four years old and still breathing, Miss Bennett," Dominic replied coldly. "Celeste didn't design this alone. She lacks the technical sophistication to synthesize odorless cyanide compounds, and she certainly doesn't have the leverage to turn Luc. Luc has been with Le Triomphe for nine years. He was vetted by my personal security detail twice a year."
"Then who turned him?"
"That," Dominic said, looking out the rain-streaked window as the car swept up a private subterranean ramp beneath a towering glass skyscraper in Midtown, "is what Luc is going to tell us before the night is over."
The car came to a stop inside a private, subterranean garage.
The space was pristine: polished white epoxy floors, industrial floodlights, and a dozen black SUVs parked in neat, military rows. As the car doors unlocked with a hiss of pneumatic seals, Gabe stepped forward, opening Dominic’s door.
"The sommelier is awake, boss," Gabe said, his voice completely level. "We put him in the staging room on Sub-level Three."
Dominic stepped out of the car, then turned and offered his hand to me.
I looked at his outstretched hand. The long, clean fingers that had just torn a multi-million-dollar fraud to shreds. The hand of a man who moved through a world of lethal shadows with the casual grace of an apex predator.
If I took that hand, my old life was over. The waitress from Astoria, the broke linguistics graduate, the girl worrying about three thousand dollars in rent—she was gone.
*You stepped into the arena the moment you translated that clause,* an inner voice whispered. *There is no going back.*
I reached out and took Dominic’s hand.
His grip was steel, pulling me effortlessly up from the leather seat.
May you like
"Welcome to the headquarters of Rinaldi Global, Miss Bennett," he said, his eyes holding mine with an intensity that made my knees tremble. "Let's go find out who tried to murder us."
***
