Chapter 17
Chapter 17
THEME: FONT SIZE: 18pxNames. Payments. Shell companies. Dates.
She had kept this ledger for years. Every transaction, every transfer, every company registered in a name that meant nothing to anyone who did not know where to look.
Bellini appeared on nearly every page.
But beside his name, again and again, Bianca had written a small symbol — not a check, not an X. A circle with a line through it.
Dante turned pages faster.
Then he stopped.
Alessia looked over his shoulder.
“What?”
Dante pointed.
In the margin, in his mother’s hand, four sentences.
Lorenzo knows. Keep him close until I know who he is protecting.
He protects.
Ask him.
Alessia stared.
“Bellini wasn’t the person stealing the money,” she said.
“No.”
“He knew who was.”
“Yes.”
“Then why run?”
Dante looked at the ledger.
“Because whoever took the folder thinks he knows too much.”
His phone vibrated. A message from Matteo.
Found Bellini’s car. Empty. Blood on the driver’s door.
Alessia’s face changed. “Is he dead?”
“We don’t know.”
Dante closed the ledger.
Then something fell from between the pages.
A photograph.
He caught it before it hit the floor and turned it over in the dim light.
Four people, standing in front of the same warehouse as the other photograph. Bianca Moretti. Giovani Romano. Lorenzo Bellini. And a fourth man — tall, dark, with Dante’s jaw and Dante’s eyes and a smile that had been cropped at the edge by the frame.
Dante stared at him.
Alessia noticed.
“You know him?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
Dante’s voice became almost inaudible.
“My uncle.”
She looked at the photograph again.
“Vittorio Moretti,” he said. “My father’s younger brother. The man who supposedly died fourteen years ago.”
Alessia looked from the photograph to Dante and back.
“Supposedly,” she repeated.
Dante turned the photograph over.
Bianca had written one sentence on the back, in the same faded ink as the ledger, in the same careful hand.
Vittorio cannot know Allesia exists.
Neither of them moved.
Alessia read it again. Her name, in a dead woman’s handwriting, in a storage locker her father had kept for twenty years.
“My name,” she said. “Why is my name on this?”
Dante looked at her.
May you like
“You weren’t even working for my family then. I was twelve.” She looked up. “Which means my mother knew who you were.”
“No,” Dante said. “It means Bianca Moretti knew who you were. And she thought my uncle couldn’t know.”
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