Chapter 20 - The Delivery at Midnight
By midnight, the city was quiet.
Torrisi was in maximum security federal custody, facing thirty years of unbailable racketeering and treason charges. Vanessa Bellini had signed a full confession and was being transported to a witness protection facility in an undisclosed state, her days of luxury completely extinguished.
The Moretti estate was bathed in the warm glow of the library fireplace.
Mrs. Moretti had finally gone to sleep, exhausted by the emotional toll of the past forty-eight hours. Luca and I sat on the leather sofa, a single bottle of vintage wine open between us, the silent tension that had gripped us for weeks slowly dissolving into profound relief.
Luca reached over, his fingers sliding into mine, his thumb gently caressing the back of my hand.
"It's over," he murmured, his dark eyes soft, reflecting the amber flames. "The Bellinis. Torrisi. The empire is clean, Elena. And you were the one who saved it."
"We saved it together," I replied, leaning my head against his shoulder, letting the deep exhaustion finally wash over me. For the first time since I stepped into this house as a humble maid, I felt a deep, unshakable peace.
Suddenly, the front gates chime sounded.
Luca sat up instantly, his protective instincts snapping back into place. "Who could that be at this hour?"
I pulled up the security monitor on my phone. A lone courier van was idling outside the perimeter. The courier walked up to the guard booth, handed a sealed black wooden box to our security team, and immediately drove away into the night.
Two minutes later, the head of security knocked softly on the library door and carried the box inside.
"It cleared the scanners, Boss. No explosives, no chemical traces," the guard said, placing the heavy box on the coffee table. "But it wasn't addressed to you, Mr. Moretti."
Luca frowned. "Who is it addressed to?"
The guard looked at me with an uneasy expression. "It’s addressed to Miss Elena."
My heart gave a strange, violent thump.
I stepped toward the table. The black wooden box had no return address, only my full legal name etched into a polished brass plate on top. Beside the plate was a small wax seal stamped with an emblem I had never seen before—a coiled serpent eating its own tail around a cracked porcelain cup.
Luca moved beside me, his hand resting on the grip of his pistol as I reached out with trembling fingers and broke the wax seal.
The lid swung open on silent brass hinges.
Inside, resting on a bed of black velvet, was an antique silver pocket watch, stopped exactly at 3:17—the exact time of my father's death ten years ago in an unsolved car crash. Beneath it lay a handwritten letter written on crested stationery, alongside an old black-and-white photograph.
I picked up the photograph with shaking hands.
It showed Mrs. Moretti as a young girl, standing beside a handsome, dark-haired man holding an infant in his arms.
I flipped the photo over. Written in faded black ink were the words:
May you like
*"To my dearest brother—protect Elena with your life until she returns to claim her rightful throne."*
Before I could even breathe, the lights across the entire estate abruptly died, plunging the room into pitch-black darkness—and from the woods just beyond the estate's rear wall, the unmistakable wail of a tactical siren shattered the night.
