Chapter 3
"No," I replied, turning my gaze toward the dining room where Sophia shrank into the shadows. "You were trying to protect her. And now, neither of you will have a name worth protecting."
I pulled my arm free. This time, he didn't dare grab me again, because through the cut-glass panels of the heavy front doors, the silhouettes of two men had appeared.
They weren't Moretti soldiers. They didn't wear tracksuits, leather coats, or heavy gold chains. They wore dark gray bespoke overcoats, tailored charcoal wool, and black umbrellas held at parade rest despite the absence of rain.
My cousins. Michael and Julian Bennett.
Men whose business cards said Private Equity and Asset Management, but whose real work was managing the ledger that kept every corrupt alderman, district attorney, and syndicate underboss in Cook County awake at three in the morning.
I walked through the double doors. The winter air hit my face like cold water, shocking the numbness out of my skin and replacing it with pure, crystalline clarity.
Michael opened the rear door of an obsidian-black Mercedes-Maybach idling smoothly in the circular drive. He didn't say a word; he simply placed a respectful hand against the top of the door frame as I ducked inside.
Behind us, Vincent burst onto the stone portico, his jacket undone, the bitter wind whipping his white shirt.
"Claire!" he yelled down the steps. "Get out of that car! You don't walk away from me! Do you hear me? You're a Moretti!"
Julian, the younger of my cousins, paused with his hand on the driver's side door. He turned around slowly, looked up at Vincent, and said just one sentence:
"Not anymore, kid."
The Bennett family compound in Lake Forest did not look like the fortress Salvatore Moretti inhabited in Burr Ridge. There were no armed sentries conspicuously patrolling the perimeter in black SUVs, no ostentatious stone lions guarding the iron gates.
It was an English manor built in 1912, hidden behind twelve-foot brick walls covered in dormant ivy, surrounded by forty acres of towering white oaks and hemlocks that muffled the sound of the nearby lake. Power here was not measured by horsepower or bullet counts; it was measured by silence.
When I entered the grand library on the second floor, a fire was crackling in the massive hearth of hand-carved limestone.
My grandfather, Henry Bennett, sat in a wingback chair upholstered in deep burgundy leather. A silver tea service rested on the mahogany side table, beside an open leather ledger dating back to the late 1960s. His hair was completely silver, neatly trimmed, and his eyes, behind rimless spectacles, possessed the clear, unyielding depth of arctic ice.