Chapter 7
Antonio found the old collection books overnight.
Not because Dominic gave them up.
Because Sofia had hidden copies.
Elise kept them.
Daniel had never known.
The bakery basement contained a loose brick behind the flour shelves. Inside were three oilskin notebooks filled with business names, dates, amounts, initials.
Victor.
Then later Dominic.
Father to son.
A private tax inside my territory.
I turned pages until I found Vance Bakery.
The first entry was eight years old.
PAID — ELISE.
Then another.
REFUSED.
Then:
SOFIA INVOLVED.
My hands tightened.
The next page had no amount.
Only one word.
MARINA.
I stared at it.
Daniel understood too.
“Elise knew.”
“Yes.”
“She never told me.”
“She was protecting you.”
He laughed bitterly.
“Everybody keeps saying that right before explaining why somebody lied.”
Fair.
I looked at him.
“You’re right.”
He seemed surprised.
Protection without consent had done enough damage around me.
I kept reading.
After Sofia died, Elise stopped helping.
Victor apparently left her alone.
For years.
Then Victor died.
Dominic inherited the notebooks.
And unlike his father, he had no emotional reason to leave Elise untouched.
He saw a bakery sitting on valuable property.
A widower.
A child.
Debt.
Opportunity.
Then I found the entry that made my blood go cold.
ELISE — FINAL WARNING.
Date: two weeks before her death.
Daniel read it over my shoulder.
His face changed.
“My wife died from cancer.”
“Yes.”
The entry did not prove otherwise.
I would not invent murder simply because Dominic had become easy to hate.
But it proved he pressured a dying woman two weeks before she died.
“What warning?” Daniel asked.
Dominic stood across the basement.
I looked at him.
He answered reluctantly.
“Elise found the books.”
“She already knew about them.”
“She found my copies.”
That mattered.
“What did she threaten?”
“To take them to Rocco.”
I almost smiled without humor.
Eight years earlier, Sofia told Elise not to come to me because I trusted Victor.
Eight years later, Elise finally decided I might be ready to hear it.
She died before she could.
Dominic looked at me.
“She was sick. I didn’t touch her.”
I believed that.
Again, truth did not make him innocent.
It made the cruelty more ordinary.
He intimidated a dying woman because he assumed death would finish the silence for him.
May you like
Then her three-year-old daughter walked into my club with a bakery bag.
And everything Victor built began collapsing because a child gave away her last coins.
