Chapter 10 - THE MOTHER WHO HAD BEEN ALIVE THE WHOLE TIME
Nobody expected Elena Falcone to remember everything.
She had spent fourteen years hidden under false medical identities.
Moved between private facilities.
Sedated.
Isolated.
Declared unstable whenever she tried to explain who she was.
Victor never killed her because he needed signatures tied to her trusts.
He kept her alive.
Controlled.
Invisible.
Roman sat beside her hospital bed.
Declan stood by the window.
Gabriel cried openly and made no attempt to hide it.
I stayed outside until Elena asked for me.
When I entered, her eyes widened.
“Nora.”
My throat tightened.
“No.”
I stepped closer.
“I’m Maeve.”
Elena began crying.
“You have her eyes.”
I sat.
“Did my mother know you were alive?”
Elena nodded.
“At first.”
“What happened?”
“Nora helped me escape once.”
My heart pounded.
“When?”
“Eight years ago.”
Two years before Mom died.
Elena and Nora reached a safe house.
Victor found them.
Elena was taken again.
Nora escaped.
That was when Victor began hunting her aggressively.
The “car accident” happened two years later.
“Did Victor kill her?”
Elena closed her eyes.
“Yes.”
The word hurt even though I already knew.
“He ordered it.”
My hands shook.
“He made it look accidental.”
I cried silently.
Elena reached for me.
I let her.
“I am sorry.”
“You didn’t kill her.”
“No.”
“But my family brought danger into hers.”
There was no easy answer.
Then she told me something worse.
“Nora knew she might die.”
“What?”
“She left a second copy of the records.”
“Where?”
“She said somewhere Victor would never look.”
I thought of our lives.
Tiny apartments.
Secondhand furniture.
Cheap storage.
Mom trusted boring things.
Then I remembered.
Her recipe box.
I still had it.
Wooden.
Grease-stained.
Full of handwritten cards.
One recipe always confused me.
Atlantic Potatoes.
Mom never called them that.
The card contained numbers beside each ingredient.
3-17-9-4-22.
Coordinates?
Code?
Adrian looked at the sequence.
“Storage locker.”
“What?”
“Nora and I used number substitution.”
Letters.
C-Q-I-D-V?
No.
Then he reversed it.
22-4-9-17-3.
Still wrong.
Elena smiled weakly.
“Nora hated complicated codes.”
Of course.
The numbers were page numbers.
Her old cookbook.
I retrieved it from our apartment.
Pages 3, 17, 9, 4, 22.
First letters of each recipe title:
S.
A.
F.
E.
R.
Safer?
Then Lily noticed something.
“Last letters.”
We tried.
P I E R 7.
Pier Seven.
An abandoned municipal storage pier outside Baltimore.
Mom had hidden evidence there.
Federal investigators searched it.
Inside a locker they found documents.
Photographs.
And one sealed envelope addressed to me.
The first line read:
Maeve, if Elena is alive, do not let the Falcones hide what their father did.
Roman went still.
Their father.
Michael Falcone.
May you like
The man they had spent the entire investigation believing opposed Victor.
Mom was saying he had a secret too.
