That night, the house on Crestview Drive was emptier than it had ever been.

Marco’s aprons were gone from the kitchen hooks. The library was cleared of its ledgers and union files. The long dining table, where twenty men had gathered every Sunday for three decades, sat under a single low chandelier, polished and barren.

Dante was downstairs in the gatehouse, monitoring the outer perimeter. He had reported no vehicles, no watchers, no gray sedans.

I sat in the leather armchair in the great room—the same chair where my uncle had sat while I choked on the floor.

On the small side table beside me lay two objects.

The first was the real EpiPen, two adult doses sealed in their sterile plastic tubes, ready and accessible.

The second was the red plastic toy injector Emma had given me, its blunt plastic tip resting against the polished mahogany.

Outside, the wind had picked up, driving cold rain against the high French doors that looked out over the darkened lawn. Somewhere down in the valley, the foghorns on the Hudson were sounding their slow, mournful warnings through the mist.

I opened the drawer to put the toy away, beside the fountain pen and the notepad.

As my fingers touched the plastic, the landline phone on the desk—a private, hardwired copper line that was not connected to the estate’s switchboard, a number known to only three people in the world—began to ring.

It didn't chime through the console. It rang with the heavy, mechanical strike of an old brass bell.

I froze.

My father had installed that line in 1988. One of the numbers belonged to Carlo, who was currently in a federal holding cell with no telephone privileges. The second had belonged to my father, who had been dead for six years.

The third had belonged to Nico Bellini.

Nico, who had supposedly boarded a freighter out of Baltimore three days ago to disappear into South America before the grand jury warrants were unsealed.

The bell rang a second time, loud and metallic in the empty room.

I stood up, walked slowly across the parquet floor, and picked up the heavy black receiver.

I didn't say hello. I waited, the receiver pressed against my ear, listening to the crackle of a long-distance connection through the wire.

For five seconds, there was only the sound of heavy rain falling on the other end of the line—rain beating against a metal roof.

Then a voice spoke.

It wasn't Nico.

It was a woman’s voice, low, measured, and familiar, but colder than I had ever heard it before.

"Alejandro," she said, her breath fogging through the microphone. "Emma left her bunny backpack in the back of your SUV."

I held the receiver tight, my knuckles turning white. "Sofia? Where are you calling from? That line is private."

"I know it's private," she said quietly. "Your father gave the number to my mother twenty-five years ago, before you ever took over the docks. Look inside the bottom seam of Emma's backpack, Alejandro. Before Dante finds it."

The line went dead with a sharp, hollow click, followed by the flat, endless drone of the dial tone.