Chapter 6
For thirteen seconds Damian forgot how to breathe.
The blankets were thrown aside and the balcony doors stood open to the storm. Mr. Bunny lay facedown under the window. From the corridor, Luca shouted that the perimeter had locked itself.
Whoever had taken Mia was still inside the estate.
“Seal the gates,” Damian said. “Nobody fires unless they see her clearly. If anyone starts a gunfight in this house, a three-year-old is in the middle of it.”
Claire picked up the rabbit with shaking hands. “She’ll be so scared.”
“No.” Damian wasn’t sure whom he was answering. “She believes I’m coming.”
It was the only thing holding him together.
The security feeds showed internal cameras going dark one at a time, moving from Mia’s room toward the old wine cellar. Whoever carried her knew the blind spots from before Damian upgraded the system.
Luca studied the pattern. “Those routes are older than me.”
“Your father knew them.”
Luca’s face hardened. “So did yours.”
It stopped Damian where he stood. Anthony had designed half the original layout. If he or his brother had lived, either could walk through these walls without tripping a single outer alarm.
—
They followed the dead cameras down through the cellar with Luca in front and Marco keeping Claire a few yards back. At the bottom of the last stair they found one guard unconscious and a steel door standing open. Beyond it ran a tunnel built during Prohibition and sealed before Damian was born. Its map existed in only one place, Anthony’s original architectural files.
Someone had opened that file recently.
They moved through darkness. Water dripped somewhere ahead. Then a child’s voice carried down the stone.
“You’re not my mommy.”
Damian nearly dropped to his knees. Alive. She was alive.
A man’s voice answered, gentle and old. “No, sweetheart.”
“You’re wrinkly.”
Luca glanced at Damian despite everything.
“That happens,” the man said.
Mia considered this. “Uncle Damian is less wrinkly.”
Damian almost laughed.
The tunnel opened into a stone chamber beneath the old chapel on the western boundary. Mia sat on an overturned crate eating crackers. A thin old man leaned against the wall with no weapon in his hands. His silver hair brushed his collar, and one side of his face was ridged with burn scars.
“Sebastian,” Claire whispered.
Damian knew him anyway. Age and fire had changed nearly everything but the eyes. His godfather. The man from the empty coffin.
“You’re alive.”
“So are you.”
Damian crossed the room before anyone could stop him and hit him. Sebastian slammed into the wall.
“No fighting!”
Mia stood with her fists on her hips. Even Sebastian laughed through his split lip.
Damian wanted to hit him again. Instead he asked why Sebastian had taken her.
“I didn’t.” Sebastian wiped blood from his mouth. “I found her walking down here alone.”
Claire stared. “Mia?”
Mia shrugged. “Rabbit showed me.”
Tucked beneath one ear of Mr. Bunny was a hidden stitched arrow. Claire closed her eyes. Her mother had sewn the rabbit as a map.
Sebastian told them what had happened upstairs. Someone had come for Mia, and Mrs. Bell’s emergency shutters had forced the kidnapper back from the balcony. Mia had slipped through a service panel Claire had once shown her for emergencies. The intruder fled.
“Then who left the note?”
Sebastian’s face darkened. “Carlo.”
Luca stepped forward. “My father is dead.”
“No.” Sebastian looked at him with real sorrow. “He never had cancer. The illness was staged. You watched medication make him look dying.”
Luca’s face emptied.
“Carlo wanted his own son to believe him dead.”
Luca turned away and struck the stone wall with his open hand. It sounded like something breaking.
—
Then Sebastian told them all of it.
Twenty-two years ago, Anthony discovered that Carlo was using Romano shipping companies to drain pension funds and sell company secrets to rivals. He meant to remove him. Carlo moved first. He had drugged Anthony’s drink at the boathouse. Sebastian arrived unexpectedly and interrupted him. In the struggle, Anthony was struck in the head and fell into the water.
Robert pulled him out. Sebastian thought his brother was dying. Carlo controlled the private doctor and the funeral director, so Sebastian made a desperate choice. If Carlo believed both brothers dead, Anthony might live long enough to recover.
Peter D’Amico had already been killed in the confrontation. His body went into Anthony’s coffin. Sebastian’s stayed empty.
It was meant to last weeks. Anthony’s memory never came back whole. Sebastian moved him from clinic to clinic while Carlo hunted witnesses. A nurse disappeared. An investigator died. Robert stayed behind because leaving would have exposed Damian.
“I tried to come back for you once,” Sebastian said. “Your mother stopped me.”
That was the one that hurt.
“She knew?”
Sebastian looked at the floor. “She thought you were safer believing he was dead.”
Damian laughed, and it had no humor in it. “Twenty-two years of everybody deciding what I was better off not knowing.”
No one answered.
Sebastian said he had finally found Anthony three months ago in a monastery hospital, under the name Arthur Raines. Anthony remembered almost nothing, but one phrase returned whenever he saw Sebastian. *My son.*
Claire stepped forward then. She had been protecting one more secret, even from Sebastian. Her mother Evelyn was Carlo Marino’s younger sister.
Luca stared at her. “That makes you my cousin.”
Carlo had used Evelyn’s name to hide accounts because no one expected his timid sister to keep records against him. She had given the ledgers to Sebastian and spent the rest of her life protecting them. The last ledger, Carlo believed, was hidden where only family would find it.
“I don’t know where,” Claire said.
“But Mia might,” Sebastian said quietly.
Claire turned the rabbit under the lamp. Inside one ear, tiny stitches made numbers. Inside the other, letters. Marco photographed them and ran the pattern.
Coordinates.
May you like
Luca went pale. “I know that place.”
It was the Marino family chapel, abandoned since his father’s supposed death. Beneath it was an old burial crypt.
