Chapter 6
"I saw them from this window," Clara said, refusing to back down from his menacing stare. "She gave him a silver key. Ricci pocketed it, touched her face, and walked away like he owned her."
Alessandro didn't explode in rage. Instead, an eerie, terrifying calm settled over him. He walked slowly over to the desk, pulled out a satellite burner phone, and dialed a single digit.
"Marco," Alessandro said quietly. "Pull the security footage from the south garden fountain between eleven and eleven-thirty tonight."
A beat of silence hung on the line. Then Marco’s voice returned, strained and uneasy. "Boss... the south garden cameras were looped on an internal override. System shows the bypass was authorized using your private master code fifteen minutes before midnight."
Alessandro’s fingers tightened on the phone. "Understood."
He hung up without another word.
He looked at Clara. The suspicion in his eyes hadn't completely vanished, but something heavier had taken its place—a cold realization that the rot in his house went much deeper than a jealous fiancée.
"Julian never had the money," Clara said, stepping forward. "He lived in Syracuse on a mechanic’s salary. We struggled to pay rent. When he was sick, we could barely afford the prescriptions. If he had twenty million dollars, would he have let his daughter sleep in a drafty two-room apartment?"
"Julian didn't die in a car accident, Clara," Alessandro said, his voice dropping into a harsh rasp. "He died of radiation poisoning from a dirty detonator core during an ambush in the Alps."
Clara gasped, dropping onto the edge of the bed. Her hand flew to her mouth. "What did you say?"
"He came to me five years ago, coughing blood, begging me to hide his wife and unborn child," Alessandro continued, his eyes darkening with old ghosts. "He told me someone in my inner circle had traded military-grade components to the Riccis. I gave Julian five hundred thousand dollars in cash, forged papers, and told him to disappear."
"You... you gave him the identity?" Clara whispered, tears stinging her eyes. "You created 'Julian Bennett'?"
"Julian’s real name was Lucas Vance," Alessandro said. "He was my foster brother."
Clara’s world shattered.
*Lucas Vance.* The name was carved into the silver pocket watch Julian had always kept in his locked wooden box—the box that had disappeared from her Syracuse apartment the night after his funeral.
"Then who died in that car in Syracuse?" Clara cried out, her voice breaking. "Who was in that casket?!"
"I don't know," Alessandro said, his jaw tight. "Because I didn't order the hit on Syracuse. And Lucas wasn't supposed to die until the radiation took him."
Emma whimpered, reaching into the pocket of her blue rabbit. Her tiny fingers tugged at a small, hard object caught in the inner lining, pulling it free.
It wasn't stuffing.
It was an antique brass key stamped with the number *402*, and wrapped around the brass ring was a woman’s gold wedding band.
Alessandro looked at the ring, his breath catching sharply in his throat.
May you like
"That's my mother’s ring," Alessandro whispered. "She was buried with it twenty years ago."
***
