Chapter 3 - THE LOCKED BLUE ROOM
The alarm sounded before Luca reached the stairs.
Two guards rushed in from the east corridor. “Mr. Moretti, the west gate’s been breached.”
“By whom?”
“We don’t know. The camera feed cut out ninety seconds ago.”
Luca handed Sophie to Emily. “Take her to the panic room. Don’t open the door for anyone but me.”
Sophie caught his sleeve. “Daddy, don’t let them take Mommy again.”
He bent and kissed her forehead. “I won’t.”
The words frightened him because he had no idea whether he could keep them.
Luca went to the blue room alone. Its lock had been changed after Isabella disappeared, and dust lay thick along the doorframe. He turned the key, pushed inside, and smelled the faint trace of lavender—her perfume, or memory playing tricks on him.
The room had been preserved exactly as he’d left it. A blue velvet chair stood beside the window. Books lined the shelves. A clock with a cracked face sat on the mantel, frozen at 11:17.
Sophie had remembered the broken clock.
Luca checked the room methodically. The drawers were empty. The wardrobe contained Isabella’s old coats. Behind a framed photograph, he found a small dent in the plaster and a thin scratch along the baseboard. Someone had moved a piece of furniture after the room was locked.
He pulled the bookcase away from the wall. A narrow compartment had been cut into the wood behind it. Inside lay an envelope sealed with dark red wax.
His name was written on the front in Isabella’s handwriting.
Luca’s hands shook as he opened it.
Luca, if this reaches you, then Sophie remembered the signal. That means I was right to be afraid, and it means someone has finally decided she is old enough to be dangerous.
The letter continued in short, hurried lines. Isabella wrote that she had discovered money being moved through a charitable foundation connected to the family’s shipping business. The transfers were authorized with Luca’s signature, but she believed someone had forged or misused his approvals. She had confronted Matteo because he managed the accounts.
He had denied it. Then, in the same breath, he had admitted that he was trying to protect Luca from a secret buried in their father’s estate.
Isabella had written one sentence twice: The papers are not what they seem.
A sound came from the hall.
Luca folded the letter and slipped it inside his jacket. He drew the pistol at his waist as a shadow moved across the door.
“Come out,” he said.
A young guard stepped into view, hands raised. “Sir, I found the west gate open. There’s no one outside.”
“Where’s Matteo?”
The guard hesitated.
Luca’s expression turned lethal. “Where is my brother?”
“His car was found near the service road. Empty.”
Luca shoved past him and ran downstairs. The mansion’s security system had been disabled from inside. Someone with access had let the intruder through, and Matteo had vanished in the confusion.
In the panic room, Emily sat on the floor with Sophie curled beside her. The little girl had stopped crying, but she was twisting the ribbon around her fingers until her knuckles whitened.
“Are you hurt?” Luca asked.
Emily shook her head. “She heard footsteps outside the door.”
“Did anyone come in?”
“No. But someone slid this under the door.”
She handed him a folded piece of paper.
Three words were written in black ink: Ask about Daniel.
Luca stared at it.
Daniel Moretti had been his father’s name.
His father had died eleven years earlier in what the police called a highway accident. Luca had never questioned the official report. Matteo had been the one to identify the body.
Now Luca wondered whether he had ever seen his father’s body at all.
He called his chief of security, ordered a full lockdown, and demanded the original records from the family archive. Then he turned to Emily.
“You said the woman at the clinic had a scar on her wrist. Did she say anything else?”
“She told me to tell the little girl that her mother’s favorite song was still waiting for her.”
Luca remembered Isabella singing softly to Sophie at bedtime, a melody with no lyrics. Sophie used to hum it whenever she was frightened.
“Can you hum it?” he asked his daughter.
Sophie did, very quietly. Her voice faltered on the last notes.
Emily’s face changed. “That’s the song.”
Luca felt the floor shift beneath him. The woman Emily had helped might truly have been Isabella.
He called the clinic from a secure phone. The administrator refused to give out patient information until Luca identified himself. When he did, the line went silent.
Then a woman’s voice said, “Mr. Moretti, the patient you’re asking about left us a message. We were instructed to release it only if you mentioned a song.”
Luca gripped the phone. “Play it.”
Static hissed. Then a woman whispered, breathless and distant, “Luca, if you’re hearing this, don’t trust the man who brings you the original papers. He’ll tell you the truth about the night I disappeared—but he won’t tell you why he let me go.”
The recording ended with a sharp click.
Luca stared at the phone.
He had assumed Matteo was the man who had kept Isabella from leaving.
But the message suggested something worse.
May you like
Someone had helped her escape.
And someone else had been waiting to bring her back.
