Chapter 7 - THE DEAD FATHER IN THE PHOTOGRAPH
The man in the photograph looked older.
Thinner.
Gray at the temples.
But it was my father.
I knew the slope of his shoulders.
The scar beside his eyebrow from when he fell off a bicycle as a teenager.
The way his left ear stuck out slightly more than the right.
“That's him.”
Nobody answered.
Because nobody needed to.
Michael checked the metadata.
Three days old.
Queens.
My father was alive.
Everything inside me broke at once.
Eight birthdays.
Eight Christmases.
Eight years of visiting an empty grave.
I turned on Lorenzo.
“You knew?”
“No.”
“You helped fake Carlo's death. Why wouldn't you fake my father's?”
“I didn't.”
Michael stepped between us.
“Enough.”
I hated him for saying it.
Then I realized he wasn't protecting Lorenzo.
He was protecting me from collapsing.
I pushed past him anyway.
“Find him.”
Michael nodded.
“I will.”
The search took four hours.
Regina's phone pinged near an old assisted-living facility that had closed after a fire-code investigation.
Michael's men entered first.
Then Michael.
Then me, despite his objections.
We found my father in a small room on the second floor.
Alive.
Weak.
Terrified.
“Dad?”
His eyes opened.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then his face crumpled.
“Aurora.”
I forgot Michael.
Regina.
Everything.
I crossed the room and held him.
My father smelled like antiseptic and dust.
He was painfully thin.
But alive.
“You're alive.”
“I tried to get back to you.”
I pulled away.
“For eight years?”
His eyes filled.
“Regina told me you were dead.”
The words hit like a slap.
“What?”
He explained in fragments.
After Carlo died, Daniel intended to expose the laundering operation.
Before he could, Regina drugged him.
He woke in a private medical facility under another identity.
She showed him a newspaper clipping about a fatal apartment fire.
The victim's first name was Aurora.
Regina convinced him it was me.
“He stopped fighting,” a nurse later told investigators.
For years, Regina moved him between facilities whenever questions arose.
She controlled access.
His disability benefits.
His accounts.
His identity.
Why keep him alive?
Because Daniel knew how to access the missing Moretti money.
Twenty-seven million dollars.
My father had encrypted the account.
The necklace held part of the key.
I was the second part.
“Why me?” I asked.
Dad touched my face.
“Your mother created the passphrase.”
The encryption required answers to personal questions only I would know.
Regina could steal the necklace.
She couldn't become me.
That was why Tony's men were ordered to bring me alive.
Not to sell me.
To force me to unlock the account.
Michael stood near the window, jaw rigid.
“Where is Regina?”
Dad looked frightened.
“She was here.”
“When?”
“Ten minutes before you came.”
Michael's phone rang.
His security chief.
Regina hadn't escaped alone.
She had taken Zach.
For one horrible second, Michael didn't move.
Then his entire face changed.
The feared man I'd heard stories about vanished.
In his place stood a father whose child was missing.
My father grabbed my wrist.
“She's going to trade him.”
“For what?”
May you like
Dad looked at Michael.
“For Aurora.”
