Chapter 10 - The Music Box at the Gate

The box was not explosive.

That was the only mercy it offered.

It sat inside a blast container in the lower garage while Dominic’s security team worked around it with robots, scanners, and enough caution to make Ellie think we were all trapped in a science-fiction movie. She had stopped crying. That worried me more than tears would have.

Children should not learn to conserve fear.

The music played for eleven minutes before the mechanism wound down.

When the lid was finally opened, we found a small wooden music box inside.

I knew it.

Daniel made it the winter Ellie turned two. He carved a fish on the lid because the song he sang her every night was nonsense about a fish who wanted to fly. I thought it had burned in the workshop fire along with the rest of him.

My hands shook so badly Beatrice took the box from the technician before I dropped it.

Inside, beneath the tiny turning fish, was a folded photograph.

Daniel stood beside Dominic’s mother in the hidden workroom. With them was a young man in an expensive coat, smiling at the camera with a hand on Daniel’s shoulder.

Dominic took one look at it.

“Matteo.”

His voice had no air in it.

On the back of the photograph was a message.

YOU WERE ALWAYS TOO LATE, BROTHER.

Dominic’s guard Paul crossed himself.

Nobody teased him for it.

“There’s more,” said the technician.

A small drive had been inserted into the base of the music box, not electronic in the usual way but sealed behind a mechanical release that required rotating the fish tail, pressing the left fin, and sliding the bottom panel in a pattern only Daniel would invent.

Ellie watched from behind my chair, silent.

Dominic did not ask her to help.

He simply studied the mechanism, then looked at me.

“Did he teach you?”

I let out a tired, humorless laugh.

“Daniel tried. I told him if he wanted romance, he should stop explaining springs during dinner.”

Dominic almost smiled.

Almost.

I took the music box.

My fingers remembered what my mind had dismissed. Daniel turning puzzle locks into anniversaries. Daniel hiding grocery money in trick compartments so I would laugh after a bad day. Daniel saying, You don’t have to love machines, Mara. Just learn when they’re lying.

It opened on the fourth try.

Inside was a second recorder.

This time, the voice was not Daniel’s.

It was Matteo Romano’s.

“If this is ever played, then Daniel is either dead or smarter than I gave him credit for.”

Dominic closed his eyes.

The recording continued.

“Claudia thinks she can expose me. Daniel thinks evidence matters. My brother thinks shame makes him moral. They are all sentimental. Accidents are cleaner than bullets. Doctors are cheaper than soldiers. Grief makes people obedient.”

I gripped the edge of the table.

“Daniel Voss is a problem, but not a complicated one. Frame him. Burn the workshop. Leave enough for his widow to think the fire was ordinary. As for the child…”

The tape crackled.

Dominic opened his eyes.

“She is young. But Daniel says she sees mechanisms the way musicians hear notes. If she inherited his hands, she may one day open what Claudia hides.”

Ellie pressed herself against my side.

Matteo laughed softly.

“Children grow. So do debts.”

The recording ended.

I could not breathe.

Dominic turned away from the table. His shoulders rose once, then settled, as if he had forced something violent back into the cage of his ribs.

“He killed Daniel,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And your mother.”

“Likely.”

“And now he wants Ellie.”

Dominic faced me then.

“He will not have her.”

There was no performance in it. No romantic line from a man trying to become necessary. Just a fact he had placed at the center of himself.

Maybe that was why I believed him.

The technician cleared his throat.

“The drive has files. But there’s encryption.”

Dominic looked at the mechanism.

“Can you break it?”

“Maybe. But if this is Daniel Voss’s design, brute force may erase it.”

Everyone did not look at Ellie.

That restraint mattered too.

Ellie looked at the music box anyway.

“Daddy liked dates,” she whispered.

I knelt in front of her.

“You do not have to.”

“I know.”

She touched the fish gently.

“Try my birthday. But backwards, because Daddy said fish swim the other way when they’re scared.”

The technician entered the numbers.

The screen unlocked.

A file list appeared.

At the top was one folder labeled: WOLF PROTOCOL.

Dominic read the first document.

His face changed.

“What?” I asked.

He looked at me, then at Ellie.

“Matteo is coming tonight.”

“How do you know?”

Dominic turned the screen.

The file contained a schedule for a private Romano board vote at midnight, triggered if Dominic was declared medically incapacitated.

At the bottom was a final instruction.

BRING THE CHILD. SHE OPENS THE VAULT.

From upstairs came the sound of breaking glass.

Then the alarm began.