Chapter 5 - The Aunt Who Came Back From the Dead
The security monitor went black.
Damian moved before the echo of the gunshot had faded. He shoved Clara behind the heavy office desk and drew the pistol concealed beneath his jacket.
“Stay down.”
“What happened to Rose?”
“I'm going to find out.”
Dominic was already speaking into his radio, directing the guards toward the north gate. An alarm pulsed through the estate.
Clara crawled toward the doorway.
Damian caught her arm.
“I said stay down.”
“She is my aunt!”
“And someone just watched her shoot a security camera inside my property.”
“Maybe she was trying to stop someone from tracking us!”
“Or she was trying to create a distraction.”
He released her only after another guard confirmed that the north gate had been secured.
Rose was gone.
The guards found blood on the gravel near the gate, two spent shell casings, and a dark sedan abandoned beyond the tree line. No body. No clear trail.
Damian ordered the estate locked down.
Clara stood in the study, trembling with anger.
“You treat everyone like an enemy.”
“I treat armed people as armed people.”
“You could have asked what she wanted.”
“She had a gun.”
“She raised it toward a camera!”
“And fired. Which means either she wanted us to see her, or she wanted us to look in the wrong direction.”
Clara hated that he might be right.
That evening, Margaret brought a small package to Clara's room. It had been delivered to the estate's outer security office by a courier who disappeared before the guards could question him.
Inside lay a silver pendant and a folded note.
Clara recognized the pendant immediately. It had belonged to her mother and had been stolen from her apartment.
The note contained a single sentence:
Your mother did not die of natural causes.
Clara sat on the bed.
Her mother had died after a sudden medical crisis following months of treatment for a heart condition. The doctors had called it an unexpected complication. Clara had been too exhausted and grief-stricken to question anything.
Now every memory seemed to rearrange itself.
She remembered a black car parked across from the hospital three nights before her mother's death. She remembered her mother refusing to answer the phone. She remembered the frightened expression on her face when Clara asked whether she needed help.
Clara hurried downstairs.
Damian was in the study with Dominic.
“Someone says my mother was murdered.”
Damian read the note.
“Who delivered this?”
“No one knows.”
“Then we verify it before we believe it.”
“Of course. Another investigation. Another locked door. Another order to wait.”
“Clara—”
“No. You don't get to decide which truths I'm allowed to hear.”
She turned to Dominic.
“Can you find the hospital records?”
Dominic looked toward Damian.
Damian's expression remained unreadable.
“Help her,” he said.
For the next two days, Clara and Dominic searched through old medical records, insurance claims, and archived correspondence. The hospital's original files were incomplete, but they found something troubling: a medication authorization signed by a physician who had left the country shortly after Evelyn's death.
The dosage listed on the authorization did not match the standard treatment plan.
A second document showed that the physician had received a payment from a company connected to a Rossi shipping subsidiary.
Clara felt sick.
“Your family paid him.”
“Someone using my family's business did,” Damian replied. “That isn't the same thing.”
“It's close enough to frighten me.”
He did not argue.
Dominic traced the company to a shell corporation dissolved seven years earlier. Its final director had been Adrian Voss.
The same man who had attacked Patterson's shop.
That night, Damian found Clara in the library holding her mother's pendant.
“My father kept secrets from me,” he said.
She looked up.
“You don't sound surprised.”
“I was raised to believe that knowing less made me safer. By the time I understood what that meant, everyone who might have explained it was dead or gone.”
“Does that include your father?”
“Yes.”
Clara's expression softened.
“I'm sorry.”
He looked at her, seemingly uncertain what to do with the words.
“No one has said that to me in a long time.”
“Perhaps people are afraid of you.”
“Perhaps.”
She turned the pendant over in her fingers.
“There is a tiny compartment in the back. My mother showed it to me when I was a child. She said it was too small to hold anything important.”
Clara pressed the hidden latch.
A sliver of paper slid into her palm.
On it was a sequence of letters and numbers, followed by a date and a name:
A. VOSS — NOVEMBER 19 — ROOM 814.
Damian read it twice.
“November 19 is tomorrow.”
“What is Room 814?”
“I'm finding out.”
Dominic returned less than twenty minutes later with an answer.
Room 814 belonged to a private hospital wing that had been closed for renovations years earlier. The wing's archived visitor logs listed Evelyn Jennings on the night of Damian's father's murder.
But she had not been alone.
The second name belonged to a woman who had officially died twelve years ago.
Damian turned toward Clara.
“Your mother met someone that night.”
“Who?”
He placed the visitor log on the desk.
The name was Isabella Rossi.
May you like
Damian's mother.
And according to every official record in the family archive, Isabella had been buried six months before the meeting took place.
