Chapter 2
The name was Sebastian.
Sebastian Romano, his father’s younger brother and his godfather. He had taught Damian to tie a bowline and to lose at chess without sulking. He was supposed to have died less than twelve hours after Anthony.
Damian remembered the rain running down his face and two black coffins on two matching straps. He remembered a priest’s voice thinning in the wind. He remembered being told that Sebastian’s heart had simply given out from grief. Nobody had shown him an autopsy. His mother had said it would only make things worse.
Now a toddler was breathing on his collar and telling him the dead man’s face had been scratched out of a photograph.
“How do you know his name?”
Mia hugged her rabbit. “Mommy said whisper it to the sad man when nobody can hear.”
He should have called Luca back. His instincts had been trained for twenty years to hand a problem to the nearest soldier. But *when nobody can hear* sat in his chest like a stone. Claire Bennett had put her child on the far side of thirty-eight guards because she did not trust the guards.
Damian looked across his estate, the lawns, the terraces, the long white wall, and wondered how many locked doors protected him and how many only protected someone else from him.
He carried Mia inside himself.
Luca watched them cross the terrace. His eyes dropped to the photograph in Damian’s hand and lifted again, empty.
“What did she tell you?”
“Enough to know Claire Bennett didn’t come here by accident.” Damian didn’t slow down. “Find Robert Hale. Don’t ask me anything else until you do.”
—
His father’s study had been left almost exactly as Anthony kept it. Mrs. Bell dusted it on Thursdays. The brass letter opener still lay beside the blotter. A faint ring on the walnut marked where a coffee mug had sat every morning for years.
Mrs. Bell took Mia to the kitchen for warm milk and toast. Damian closed the door and set the watch under the green banker’s lamp.
He had held this watch a thousand times as a boy, and he looked at it now as if he had never seen it. The case was scarred and the crystal nicked. Beside the winding crown ran a scratch so small he had always taken it for wear.
It was an arrow.
He pressed the crown inward and turned it backward, against every instinct a watch teaches. Something clicked sharply under his thumb. The rear case swung open farther than any watch back should, and a second plate sat beneath the movement.
Inside lay a paper-thin brass key. Beside it was a strip of oilskin wrapped around something rectangular.
His father had carried a secret against his ribs for thirty years. In all that time he had never said a word of it to his son.
The oilskin held a small photograph of Damian at sixteen, standing beside Anthony in front of the boathouse. Someone had drawn a blue circle around a window in the background. Damian tilted it under the lamp until the glass showed a faint silhouette, a man looking out from inside.
Sebastian.
The family had always said he was in New York that entire week.
On the back, in his father’s hand, were four words:
**IF I DIE, DIG TWICE.**
Damian sat down in his father’s chair because his legs insisted on it. The words could mean many things. Beside a photograph taken hours before two deaths, they meant one thing.
He called Luca and told him to assemble a team. “Not estate security. People you’d trust with your own children.”
“For what?”
“We’re opening a grave.”
—
By late afternoon the rain had come back, thin silver lines like the day of the funeral. The Romano cemetery lay at the north edge of the property behind an iron gate Damian had personally locked every year since he took over. Luca stood beside him with a private forensic physician and four men Damian had never seen at the estate before.
They lifted the marble slab from Sebastian’s grave first.
The coffin rose from the clay with a sucking sound. The screws were corroded but whole. Nobody had opened it since the day it went down.
When the physician raised the lid, Luca lost the color in his face.
There was no body.
Sandbags lay wrapped in an old wool blanket, with several bricks tucked around them. On top was a folded newspaper dated the morning after Anthony died.
Luca swore under his breath. Damian said nothing. He was seventeen again, kneeling beside a mother who had collapsed at the graveside, her scream still echoing in his ears. He wondered, for the first time in his life, whether it had been real.
If Sebastian had survived, then either his mother had been deceived too or she had helped deceive him.
“The other one,” Damian said.
Luca stared at him. “Damian—”
“Open my father’s grave.”
He nearly stopped them twice. Some animal part of him still believed that disturbing Anthony Romano’s rest was something no reason could excuse. But the lid came off, and the physician’s expression changed again, and Damian understood before the man spoke.
There was a skeleton in Anthony’s coffin. It was far too short.
Anthony Romano had stood six feet two inches in his socks. The man in the ground was closer to five-eight.
Luca crouched, then straightened slowly. His voice was barely a breath.
May you like
“This isn’t him.”
Rain fell on the open earth. Twenty-two years after Damian buried his family, he stood between two open graves and understood that the men in the ground had been neither his father nor his uncle.
