Chapter 4 - THE DEAD MAN’S SECOND LIFEBy noon, La Stella's manager had disappeared.
His apartment was empty.
His bank accounts had been drained.
And his real name wasn't Daniel Mercer.
It was Samuel Vale.
Dante's investigators found that in forty minutes.
What they found next took considerably longer.
Samuel Vale had worked with my father.
I stared at the documents spread across Dante's library table.
There was Dad.
Younger.
Healthy.
Smiling beside Samuel at a company picnic dated twenty-two years earlier.
“I remember him.”
The realization hurt.
Dante looked up.
“He came to our house once.”
I closed my eyes.
“Uncle Sam.”
My father's friend.
He had brought me a stuffed rabbit.
Then he vanished from our lives.
Dante leaned against the desk.
“Calder has been searching for your father's evidence for two decades.”
“Then why keep me alive?”
“Because he believes you know where it is.”
“I don't.”
“He doesn't know that.”
My father's final months returned in fragments.
Confusion.
Medication.
Half-finished sentences.
One night, weeks before he died, he had grabbed my wrist.
If anyone ever asks about the lighthouse, don't trust them.
I'd assumed the morphine was speaking.
My eyes opened.
“The lighthouse.”
Dante straightened.
“What lighthouse?”
“I don't know.”
We searched Dad's remaining possessions.
Most were still boxed in my apartment, so Dante's men retrieved them.
At the bottom of one carton was a children's book.
The Lighthouse Keeper.
Dad had read it to me hundreds of times.
Inside the back cover was a handwritten coordinate.
It led to an abandoned lighthouse forty miles north.
Dante refused to let me go.
I refused to tell him the coordinates unless I went.
We compromised badly.
By sunset, six armored vehicles were climbing a coastal road.
The lighthouse stood above black water.
Inside, we found dust.
Broken furniture.
Nothing else.
Until I noticed scratches beneath the staircase.
A loose floorboard revealed a steel box.
My hands trembled opening it.
Inside were financial ledgers, photographs and a digital recorder.
I pressed play.
My father's voice filled the lighthouse.
“Ellie, if you're hearing this, then I failed to keep this away from you.”
My knees almost gave out.
Dante steadied me.
Dad explained everything.
Calder had built an alliance by secretly financing both the Russo organization and its enemies, manufacturing wars from which he profited.
Dante's father discovered part of it.
Dad discovered the rest.
Calder ordered the bombing.
But then Dad said something that made Dante freeze.
“Dante Russo was never supposed to inherit his father's empire.”
Dante stared at the recorder.
“The plan was to kill the boy too.”
I looked at him.
He had been twelve.
Dad continued.
“I got Dante out before the second bomb detonated.”
Dante's face lost its color.
“You knew?”
I whispered.
“No.”
He had spent twenty-three years believing one of his father's guards saved him.
It had been my father.
The recording continued.
“Calder has someone inside the Russo family. I never learned who.”
A sound came from outside.
Dante's head snapped toward the window.
Gunfire shattered the silence.
His guards shouted.
Dante pulled me behind the stone wall as glass exploded inward.
Someone had followed us.
He drew a weapon.
“Stay down.”
Instead, I saw movement behind him.
A red laser dot crawled across his chest.
I grabbed his jacket and pulled.
The bullet struck stone where his heart had been.
We fell together.
For one breath, his body covered mine.
His eyes locked on mine.
“You keep doing that.”
“What?”
“Saving my life.”
Another shot struck the wall.
I swallowed.
“You're making it a very demanding hobby.”
He laughed once despite the gunfire.
Then his expression changed.
His fingers brushed my cheek.
For a second, the danger disappeared.
He almost kissed me.
Almost.
Then Luca shouted from downstairs.
“Dante!”
We separated.
Minutes later, the attackers retreated.
One was captured.
Dante's men dragged him inside.
Blood ran from his eyebrow.
Dante crouched before him.
“Who told you we were here?”
The attacker smiled.
“You still don't understand.”
Dante said nothing.
The man looked directly at me.
“Ask Eleanor who her father really worked for.”
Then he laughed.
“Thomas Hale wasn't protecting the Russos.”
May you like
His smile widened.
“He was protecting her from them.”
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