🐰 The Stuffed Rabbit and the Mafia Boss’s Secret Ledger

Chapter 04 - The Rabbit’s Ear

Owen Pierce’s Mercedes sat near the east gate with the engine cold and the driver’s door open.

Snow fell in thin, irritated lines across the hood. The estate lights made everything look staged: black car, white gravel, open door, no man.

Sebastian stood beside it without a coat.

Jasper did not comment. Good men knew when comfort was irrelevant.

Inside the car, the glove compartment was empty. The navigation screen had been wiped. A silk scarf lay across the passenger seat, pale blue and expensive, scented faintly of a woman’s perfume Sebastian recognized from board dinners but could not immediately place.

“What do you want done with it?” Jasper asked.

“Photograph everything. Touch nothing.”

“There are tire tracks beyond the service road.”

“Another vehicle?”

“Looks like it.”

Sebastian stared toward the line of trees. The estate sat on twelve acres outside Denver, far enough from the city to make privacy feel like safety. That had clearly been an illusion.

“Find the second car,” he said.

His phone vibrated.

One message. Unknown number.

A photograph filled the screen.

Hannah Carter standing in his laundry room three weeks earlier. Nori beside her, coloring on the floor. The angle came from above.

A surveillance camera.

Not his.

Beneath the image, a message appeared.

SHE BROUGHT HIM IN.

Sebastian looked at it for a long moment. Then he handed the phone to Jasper.

Jasper’s expression darkened. “Someone has been inside our system.”

“No.”

“No?”

Sebastian looked back toward the house. “Someone has been outside it. Watching from places we don’t own.”

In the study, Hannah was sitting beside Nori when Sebastian returned. The child had fallen asleep again, one hand buried in the rabbit’s worn fur. Mrs. Alvarez stood nearby like a guardian saint armed with a dust cloth and disapproval.

Hannah rose at once.

“Did you find him?”

“No.”

“Then let us go.”

“No.”

Her chin lifted. “You cannot keep my daughter here.”

“I can keep her alive.”

Her anger faltered, which told him she understood danger even when pride demanded resistance.

Sebastian set his phone on the desk and showed her the photograph.

Her face changed.

“That’s my child.”

“Yes.”

“Who took that?”

“That is what I intend to discover.”

Hannah backed away from the phone as if it might bite. “I didn’t bring anyone into your house.”

“I know.”

She stared at him. “You know?”

“If you had, you would have run when you saw the ledger. You came to get your daughter.”

“Maybe I am a good actress.”

“You are too tired for theater.”

Despite herself, she almost smiled. It vanished before becoming real.

Sebastian turned toward the rabbit.

“Nori said her father was inside the ledger. You said the rabbit came from Daniel’s desk.”

Hannah’s hand went to her throat.

“No.”

“I need to examine it.”

“No.”

“Hannah.”

“You do not get to say my name like we are friends.”

That stopped him. Not because she was wrong.

Because no one spoke to him that precisely anymore.

He lowered his voice. “Someone used your daughter tonight. Someone led her into my private study using her dead father’s name. If Daniel hid something, and it is inside that toy, then whoever did this knows it too.”

Hannah looked at Nori.

The child slept with her mouth slightly open, innocent in the brutal way only children can be: proof that the world owes tenderness and often refuses to pay.

Hannah slowly lifted the rabbit.

“Don’t cut him,” she said.

“I won’t.”

Sebastian sat at the desk. He turned the rabbit carefully under the lamp. The left ear had been repaired twice. The belly seam once. But the right foot had a line of stitches too neat for Hannah’s hand and too recent for age.

He took a thin letter opener and eased one thread loose.

Hannah held her breath.

Something small and hard slid into his palm.

A brass key.

Not to his desk.

Older.

Attached to it was a strip of paper folded so tightly it had yellowed at the creases.

Sebastian opened it.

Two words were written in Daniel Carter’s careful hand.

Not Pierce.

Below that, another name.

Sebastian read it once.