Chapter 2 - THE PAPERS
“Matteo… what did you do to my wife?”
Luca’s question crossed the dining room like a blade.
His younger brother stared at him, pale beneath the chandelier light. Matteo had faced armed rivals without blinking. He had negotiated with men who kept knives under their sleeves and smiled while they threatened his life. Yet now, with twenty-four witnesses watching, he looked like a man who had just heard his own sentence pronounced.
“Luca, please,” Matteo said. “Sophie is six. She’s remembering a nightmare.”
Sophie clung to Emily’s hand. “It wasn’t a nightmare.”
Luca lifted one hand—not to silence his daughter, but to keep the room from erupting. “Nobody leaves. Nobody touches a phone. Security will collect every device until I say otherwise.”
Vanessa gave a sharp laugh. “You can’t imprison your guests because a child tells a story.”
“I can do whatever I need to do to protect my family.”
“Your family?” Vanessa’s face tightened. “I’m supposed to be part of that family.”
“Then you should have nothing to fear.”
The words landed harder than a shout. Two guards appeared at the dining room doors. Luca looked at Matteo again.
“What papers?”
Matteo wet his lips. “Business documents. Isabella was worried about the trust.”
“What trust?”
“The one created for Sophie. Isabella believed you were putting too much control in the hands of the board.”
“I didn’t create a trust without telling her.”
“You signed the preliminary documents. Three years ago. The week she disappeared.”
Luca remembered the night: a stack of papers delivered to his study, a meeting interrupted by a call about a shipment, Matteo telling him the documents were routine protections for the family estate. Luca had signed several pages without reading every line. He had trusted his brother to bring him only what mattered.
“Bring me the file,” Luca ordered.
Matteo didn’t move.
That was the answer before he spoke.
“I don’t have it.”
Luca’s jaw hardened. “You expect me to believe you organized a search for my wife for three years, but you can’t produce the papers that supposedly caused our last argument?”
“I said I don’t have them.”
Antonio, the elderly chef, stepped away from his chair. “I know where a copy might be.”
Every head turned.
Antonio looked frightened, but he kept his gaze on Luca. “Mrs. Isabella asked me to hide an envelope in the old pantry. She told me to give it to you only if the little girl turned the glass over.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Luca demanded.
“Because the threat against my granddaughter was real. They sent me a photograph of her leaving school. Then they told me what time she would be walking home the next day.” Antonio’s voice cracked. “I thought if I stayed quiet, I could keep her alive.”
Luca’s anger faltered, replaced by a colder understanding. “Who knew about the envelope?”
“Isabella. Me. And the person who searched the pantry afterward.”
“Did they find it?”
“I don’t know.”
Luca ordered two guards to escort Antonio to the kitchen. Emily stayed with Sophie while Luca moved toward Matteo. His brother instinctively stepped back.
“Don’t,” Luca warned. “I haven’t decided what I believe. But I know what I saw tonight.”
Matteo’s eyes flashed with pain. “You’re going to destroy me over a child’s memory?”
“No. I’m going to find out why you’re afraid of a piece of paper.”
For one moment, Matteo looked toward Vanessa. It was quick, almost invisible. But Luca saw it.
So did Emily.
Vanessa recovered first. “This dinner is over. I’m leaving.”
A guard blocked the doorway.
“Mr. Moretti’s instructions,” he said.
She turned on Luca. “You can’t keep me here.”
“I’m not keeping you here,” Luca replied. “I’m keeping you from warning whoever you’re working for.”
The color drained from her face.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Then you won’t mind answering questions.”
Luca took Sophie upstairs himself. Emily followed at the child’s request, carrying the pink ribbon Sophie had dropped. In the nursery, Luca knelt in front of his daughter.
“You did nothing wrong,” he told her. “Not one thing.”
“Is Uncle Matteo bad?”
Luca struggled with the question. “I don’t know yet.”
“Mommy said bad people can smile.”
“She was right to teach you to be careful. But you don’t have to solve this alone anymore.”
Sophie leaned against him. “I heard Mommy say, ‘You promised you would protect him.’ Uncle Matteo said, ‘I’m trying.’ Then there was a loud noise.”
“What kind of noise?”
“Like a door slamming. Then Mommy told him to let her go.”
Luca’s chest tightened. “Did you see where they were?”
Sophie shut her eyes. “The blue room. The room with the broken clock.”
The blue room had been Isabella’s private sitting room. Luca had locked it after she vanished. Nobody had entered it in three years.
He stood slowly.
“Emily, stay with her.”
Emily nodded, but as Luca reached the door, she spoke. “Mr. Moretti? Sophie isn’t the only person who remembers something.”
He turned.
Emily looked down at the ribbon in her hand. “I started working here six months ago. Before that, I worked nights at a private clinic in Manhattan. A woman came in under a false name. She had a scar on her left wrist and asked me to help her get a message to a little girl.”
Luca stopped moving.
“What was the woman’s name?”
“She wouldn’t tell me. But she asked if the Moretti family still lived on the Hudson.”
For the first time that night, the feared boss looked less like a man ready to punish a traitor and more like a husband afraid to hope.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“Because I didn’t know she was your wife.” Emily swallowed. “And because the next morning, someone came to the clinic asking for the nurse who had helped her.”
“Who?”
“I never saw his face. But he wore a silver ring shaped like a serpent.”
Luca looked toward the hall, where Matteo was being watched by armed guards.
May you like
Matteo wore a serpent ring.
And when Luca returned to the dining room, his brother was gone.
