The dial tone buzzed against my ear like an angry hornet until I slammed the heavy receiver back down onto its brass cradle. The study was suffocatingly quiet. Outside, the fog was crawling up from the Hudson, clinging to the tall French windows, turning the manicured lawn into a gray smear.

"Look inside the bottom seam," Sofia had said. "Before Dante finds it."

I didn’t take the elevator down. The hydraulic whine would echo through the central atrium, and Dante’s quarters were directly beneath the second-floor gallery. Instead, I took the service stairs behind the library, stepping on the carpeted edges where the hundred-year-old oak treads wouldn't creak. My lungs still burned with the residual ache of the anaphylaxis that had nearly killed me seventy-two hours earlier, but my pulse was hammering against my ribs.

The garage smelled of motor oil, cold stone, and damp limestone. My armored Suburban sat in bay three, its black paint reflecting the overhead halogen tubes in dull, greasy strips.

I unlocked the rear door with the key fob pressed into my palm to muffle the chirp. The leather interior still smelled faintly of the strawberry hard candies Nico used to give Emma to keep her quiet during long drives.

On the floorboard behind the driver’s seat, tucked beneath the rubber all-weather mat, was the white plush backpack. Its rabbit ears were limp, smudged with purple crayon at the tips.

I picked it up. It felt heavier than an empty child’s bag should.

Taking the utility knife from my pocket, I slid my thumbnail along the coarse nylon piping at the base. Sofia hadn't used a zipper. She had cut through the inner satin lining and stitched it shut with thick, uneven loops of black thread—the kind of emergency repair a terrified woman makes in a motel bathroom with a sewing kit stolen from the front desk.

I sliced the thread.

My fingers went into the gap, brushing past cheap polyester batting until they hit cold metal and hard plastic.

I pulled out two objects.

The first was a flat, heavy key stamped with the logo of the Hudson National Bank, marked with safety deposit box number 418.

The second was a micro-cassette tape wrapped in a folded sheet of yellow legal paper. The paper was covered in my father’s unmistakable handwriting—angular, heavy-pressed, and dated three weeks before the heart attack that put him in the ground six years ago.

At the bottom of the page, beneath a list of offshore container numbers, my father had written three words in blue ballpoint: *Dante’s second ledger.*

Footsteps scraped across the gravel apron outside the open bay door.