Chapter 19 - Three Days Before the WeddingLorenzo looked at Vivian.
She stopped breathing.
“There’s more.”
Vivian sat down.
“Yes.”
Three days before their first wedding, Vivian had disappeared for six hours.
Lorenzo remembered being told she was at a bridal fitting.
She had not been.
She had gone to Rikers Island.
To visit a prisoner named Samuel Vale.
Giancarlo’s younger brother.
Samuel had been convicted of killing a dockworker.
But Anthony Bellini’s notes suggested Samuel was actually an informant who had taken the fall for Giancarlo in exchange for protection for his daughter.
Vivian met him because Elena believed he knew who ordered Anthony’s murder.
Samuel refused to name Giancarlo.
Instead, he gave Vivian a warning.
Do not marry Lorenzo Falcone.
“He told you not to marry me?” Lorenzo asked.
“Yes.”
“And you did anyway.”
Vivian looked at him.
“He also told me why.”
Samuel believed Vale planned to use the wedding to consolidate Bellini assets, then eventually eliminate both spouses.
Vivian could have run.
She nearly did.
She had a train ticket to Montreal.
Lorenzo stared.
“You were going to leave before our wedding?”
“Yes.”
“What stopped you?”
Vivian’s eyes filled.
“You.”
“I barely spoke to you.”
“The night before I planned to leave, I saw you outside St. Vincent’s.”
Lorenzo remembered the hospital.
A soldier’s daughter had leukemia.
He had anonymously paid for an experimental treatment.
He had threatened the family never to tell anyone.
Vivian had seen him sitting alone in his car afterward, crying.
“I realized the man everyone described and the man you were when nobody watched weren’t the same person.”
“So you stayed because you thought you could save me?”
“No.”
Vivian shook her head.
“Because I thought you deserved the chance to save yourself.”
Mara’s phone buzzed.
A prison archive request had returned.
Samuel Vale had supposedly died twelve years earlier.
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But the death certificate was false.
Samuel Vale was alive.
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