Chapter 2 - THE DEAD WOMAN'S LAST LETTER
Victoria Bellini had been engaged to Damiano for six months. Her family owned construction companies, political friendships, and enough old grudges to poison a city. I knew her mostly by the sound of her heels on marble and the particular silence that followed whenever she entered a room. Isabella knew her differently. My sister had once told me that Victoria could smile while deciding which part of your life to destroy.
Damiano read the message twice. "How does she know?" he asked.
"I don't know." I hated how small my voice sounded. "I only brought Marisol here yesterday."
"Yesterday? Where was she before?"
"With me in my apartment. Someone followed us home. The same black car passed our building three times. I thought your house was the one place nobody would dare break into." My laugh came out bitter. "Apparently I was wrong."
He called Luca. "Put two people outside Elina's door. Discreetly. And tell Victoria I will speak with her in the library in ten minutes."
"Don't leave me alone with your guards," I blurted.
He lowered the phone. "Why?"
"Because Isabella didn't know who to trust. Neither do I."
He considered that without taking offense. "Then I'll send Mrs. Alvarez. She's run this house since before I was born. She has never lied to me."
"That you know of."
For the first time, something like admiration flickered across his face. "Fair point. Keep the door open."
When he left, I unfolded Isabella's letter. I'd read it so many times the paper had grown soft at the creases. She had written it during the last week of her pregnancy, in handwriting that trembled toward the end. She said she had loved Damiano. She said he had made promises he might never remember making because someone had worked very hard to separate them. She said the baby deserved the truth, but only when the truth would no longer put her in danger.
There was one paragraph I'd never understood: The transfer wasn't money. It was proof. They hid it where the freight never moves, and the doctor knows which name they used.
I looked at the photograph again. The man carrying medical supplies wore a badge turned away from the camera. Behind him stood a loading dock with a faded number seventeen.
Mrs. Alvarez arrived carrying a bassinet, diapers, and a look that told me she already knew more than she intended to admit. "A dresser drawer," she said, surveying the room. "Child, that baby needs a proper place to sleep."
"I know. I didn't have one."
She placed the bassinet beside the bed. "Then you should have asked me."
I wanted to believe her. Instead, I asked, "Did you know my sister?"
Her hands stopped moving. "Isabella?"
The way she said the name answered me. "You knew."
"I knew she was pregnant. I didn't know where she went." She sat carefully. "And I knew Damiano never stopped looking for her, though he pretended otherwise."
That revelation hurt. For months Isabella had believed Damiano had rejected her. I had helped her survive that rejection, never questioning the letter she'd received on Rossi stationery. Now I wondered who had actually written it.
The letter had arrived on a Tuesday. I remembered because Isabella had called me while I was buying groceries, and I'd abandoned a cart full of frozen food to take a bus across town. She'd been sitting on her kitchen floor with the paper spread across her knees. The signature looked convincing. The words did not. Whoever wrote them knew the language of contracts but nothing about the way Isabella and Damiano talked to each other. I had noticed that much, then decided a man like Damiano probably had an attorney write his breakups, too.
That decision haunted me. We'd treated his silence as confirmation instead of asking whether the letter was real. But by then Isabella had already seen the black sedan outside her apartment. She was frightened, pregnant, and convinced that speaking to Damiano would put her child in danger. We were not characters in a movie who could simply march into a fortified mansion and demand answers. We were two sisters with hourly wages, a borrowed car, and no idea which of the people promising protection were taking notes for someone else.
Mrs. Alvarez noticed my hands twisting the paper. She took it from me only when I offered it. Under the bedside lamp, she pointed to a detail I had overlooked: the crest was printed in gray, not the deep blue used on Damiano's personal stationery. The difference might mean nothing. It might mean everything. She took a photograph, then returned the letter before Marisol could wake.
"I wish she'd called me," the older woman murmured.
"So do I. But she was told you reported everything to the family."
Mrs. Alvarez shut her eyes. I realized how thoroughly someone had isolated my sister. Whoever arranged the letters hadn't needed to lock Isabella in a room. They'd made every door look dangerous until she closed them herself.
Downstairs, Victoria's voice rose through the ventilation shaft. "You're embarrassing me over a maid?"
Damiano replied too quietly to hear. A moment later glass shattered. Marisol startled, and Mrs. Alvarez scooped her up with practiced ease.
"She'll wake the child," the older woman muttered.
I stared. "You aren't surprised there's a baby here."
"At my age, very little surprises me. But this?" She studied Marisol's eyes. "This breaks my heart."
A few minutes later Damiano returned, his expression unreadable. "Victoria claims someone sent her a photograph of Elina carrying a baby through the service entrance. She says an anonymous source threatened to leak it to the press."
"Did she show you?"
"She showed me a blurred copy. I asked for the original. She refused."
He handed me a phone. On the screen was the image: me, carrying Marisol beneath my coat, crossing the rear courtyard. In the upper corner, reflected in a window, stood a security guard wearing a silver watch. I recognized him. He had checked my bag yesterday and told me to hurry before the cameras turned.
"Nico," I whispered.
Damiano's jaw tightened. "My night supervisor."
"He knew."
"Now we know he knew. That doesn't tell us who paid him."
I showed him Isabella's letter. He read it without interrupting, but when he reached the paragraph about the transfer, his face went pale. "Dock seventeen," he murmured.
"What is it?"
"A sealed facility my father used before I took over. Officially, it's empty."
"And unofficially?"
He looked at the sleeping baby. "Unofficially, it might be the reason Isabella died."
Before I could ask another question, his phone rang. Luca's name appeared. Damiano answered, listened, and went still.
May you like
"Nico is missing," he told me. "And someone just accessed the old dock with my father's credentials."
My sister's letter shook in my hands. For the first time, I suspected she hadn't died because of a love affair. She had died because she'd discovered something that powerful people couldn't afford to let a baby inherit.
