Chapter 3 - THE COLLAR OF SECRETSThe lobby gasped collectively.
Rosalie?
Monica’s face went the color of curdled milk. She staggered back a half-step, her manicured hand flying to her throat. "Mr... Mr. Valente? You... you know this... this child?"
Ezra didn't look up at her. His large, calloused hands—hands that had signed death warrants and brokered international syndicates—reached out with infinite gentleness, sliding beneath the matted, blood-soaked fur around the mastiff’s thick neck.
His fingers brushed against something hidden beneath the hide.
A heavy, grease-stained leather collar.
Ezra unbuckled it with practiced precision and pulled it free. He turned it over in his palms. There, stamped into the worn leather by an artisan in Palermo twelve years ago, was the Valente family crest—and two words burned into the hide: Per sempre. Forever.
It was the collar of Brutus, the massive war-mastiff that had belonged to Ezra’s mother, Colette Valente.
The dog that had vanished eight years ago on the exact same stormy night Colette’s car was run off the winding cliff road outside Beacon Hill—an assassination that the police had officially closed as an accidental drowning, but which Ezra knew was an inside job orchestrated by a traitor within his own inner circle.
"Dad," Rosie whispered, her voice rough from smoke and silence. "They kept him in the dark. In the old shipping containers by the docks. I found him when I escaped."
Ezra stood slowly to his feet.
May you like
The temperature in the room plummeted to absolute zero. He held the bloody leather collar in one hand, his fingers tightening until the leather creaked.
Then, he turned around to face the lobby.
