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

Chapter 06 - The Locker at Union Station

Sebastian did not tell Hannah whose voice had been on the phone.

Not immediately.

A person can be given only so much terror before the mind begins refusing delivery. Hannah had already learned that her dead husband had hidden evidence inside her daughter’s stuffed rabbit, that someone had led Nori into a locked study, and that men with more money than mercy had been watching them.

Adding a resurrected brother felt excessive before breakfast.

But Hannah watched him from the back seat of the SUV and knew he was withholding something.

Women who had survived grief and debt recognized omissions the way tailors recognized cheap thread.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Unknown caller.”

“You went pale.”

“I do that sometimes.”

“No, you don’t.”

Jasper made a sound from the front seat that might have been a cough and might have been admiration.

Sebastian looked out at Denver waking under a thin skin of snow. “My brother may be alive.”

Hannah stared at him.

Nori, half asleep against her mother, whispered, “Like Daddy?”

The question entered the car quietly and hurt everyone in it.

Hannah kissed the top of her daughter’s head.

“No, baby.”

Nori’s eyes closed again.

Sebastian said nothing.

Union Station at seven in the morning smelled of coffee, cold stone, and people trying not to miss trains. Commuters moved around them with paper cups and tired faces. None of them knew that the man in the dark overcoat had once arranged the movement of contraband through half the western corridor without lifting his voice.

It was strangely pleasant, being ignored.

The old lockers were hidden beyond a corridor marked for maintenance, behind a locked metal gate that Jasper opened with a tool he called universal and Hannah called suspicious.

The brass key from the rabbit fit locker 19.

Inside was a red file.

Hannah covered her mouth.

Daniel had been right.

The file contained invoices, payroll sheets, photocopied checks, and a small recorder wrapped in a handkerchief. Daniel’s handwriting covered the margins in neat, furious notes.

Vendor 814 was not a contractor.

It was a tunnel.

Money had been moved from Sebastian’s legitimate companies into shell charities, then into accounts controlled by men who had been buying witnesses, judges, and explosives.

Sebastian turned one page and stopped.

There was Matteo’s name again.

Not as a ghost.

As an authorized signer.

Jasper looked over his shoulder. “That’s impossible.”

“Evidently not.”

Hannah’s hand trembled as she picked up a photograph from the file. Daniel stood beside a winter road, face bruised, holding that day’s newspaper. On the back he had written: If I die, it was not the storm.

She sat down hard on the bench behind her.

Nori touched her cheek. “Mommy sad?”

Hannah tried to smile. “A little.”

Sebastian looked away.

Not from discomfort.

From shame.

Daniel Carter had tried to put truth in front of him. Sebastian had been too busy managing threats to notice the quiet accountant who saw the floorboards rotting beneath the mansion.

The recorder clicked when Jasper pressed play.

Daniel’s voice emerged, thin with static.

“If this reaches Sebastian Vale, tell him Pierce is not the head. Pierce is the bookkeeper. Matteo is alive. But Matteo answers to someone inside the house.”

Hannah looked at Sebastian.

The recording continued.

“He calls her the Duchess.”

Jasper swore under his breath.

Sebastian knew only one person in his world with that nickname.

His mother.

Nori, bored now, reached for a flyer on the bench and knocked over the file. Papers slid across the floor.

One photograph landed face up at Hannah’s feet.

It showed Daniel Carter outside Sebastian’s estate three years earlier.

Not alone.

Standing beside him was Sebastian’s mother, wearing pearls and a winter coat.

Hannah picked it up slowly.