Chapter 9 - The Man Who Guarded My Door
Nico had been locked in my basement for two days.
He had barely spoken.
Now I walked downstairs carrying my father's ledger.
I placed it in front of him.
His face changed when he saw the handwriting.
“You knew my father.”
“Yes.”
“Your name isn't Nico Valenti.”
“No.”
“What is it?”
He looked at the camera in the corner.
“Turn that off.”
“No.”
“Then Vittorio will hear everything.”
I stared at him.
“The system is isolated.”
Nico almost smiled.
“No system in this house is isolated.”
Marco immediately disconnected the room manually.
Only then did Nico speak.
“My name is Nicholas Serrano.”
The surname meant something.
My father's old driver had been Michael Serrano.
He died the same year my father did.
“My father worked for yours,” Nico said.
“I remember.”
“He discovered Vittorio's payments.”
“Then Vittorio killed him too.”
Nico nodded.
“Your father helped me disappear.”
I stared.
“You've been inside my organization for fifteen years.”
“On Enzo's instructions.”
“My father died twenty years ago.”
“He left instructions with Marco's father.”
Marco looked stunned.
Apparently even he hadn't known.
Nico's supposed betrayal had been part of a deeper operation.
He allowed Vittorio's people limited access.
Fed them controlled information.
Tracked their contacts.
But the photograph of the boys changed everything.
“I didn't send it,” he said.
“Then who did?”
“I've been trying to find out.”
He explained the mansion's cameras were compromised through a maintenance relay installed years ago.
Every time one of my security systems updated, a duplicate feed traveled elsewhere.
“Where?”
He wrote an address.
A warehouse owned by a shell company.
We raided it before dawn.
No people.
Just servers.
Thousands of hours of footage.
My house.
My office.
My cars.
Sofia's hospital room.
I stared at one recording dated five years earlier.
Sofia lay asleep.
A nurse entered.
She checked the hallway.
Then injected something into Sofia's IV.
Marco froze the image.
“That's not hospital staff.”
The woman's face was partially covered.
But her bracelet was visible.
A silver serpent.
Elena gasped.
“What?”
“I've seen that bracelet.”
“Where?”
“On Vittorio's wife.”
Vittorio's wife, Alessandra, had supposedly died seven years earlier.
Two years before Sofia.
“Impossible.”
Elena shook her head.
“I buried Sofia wearing one of Alessandra's necklaces. Sofia told me Alessandra gave it to her before she died.”
Nico looked grim.
“Alessandra may not have died.”
Another fake death.
Another ghost.
We searched the server for facial matches.
The woman appeared dozens of times.
Near the clinic.
Near Elena's second safe house.
Outside the boys' preschool.
Wearing Sofia's perfume.
Wearing Sofia's clothes.
The woman who had been conditioning my sons to trust a familiar scent was not Bianca.
She was Alessandra Moretti.
Vittorio's wife.
Alive.
She had faked her death and spent seven years operating invisibly.
Then a recent file opened.
Taken that morning.
Ana leaving Isabel's house.
My daughter.
Alessandra had found her.
I called Isabel.
No answer.
Again.
Nothing.
We reached the house twenty-eight minutes later.
The front door was open.
Isabel was on the kitchen floor, conscious but disoriented.
Ana was gone.
A red ball sat beside the doorway.
On the table was a phone.
It rang.
I answered.
A woman's voice.
Calm.
Older.
“Hello, Alejandro.”
“Alessandra.”
She laughed softly.
“Your wife always said you were quicker than people realized.”
“If you touch my daughter—”
“Ana is perfectly safe.”
“Where?”
“You're in no position to ask questions.”
Then I heard Ana in the background.
“Daddy?”
The word almost destroyed me.
She had known me two days.
And she was calling me Daddy.
Alessandra continued:
“Tomorrow night. The old Moretti hotel.”
“What do you want?”
“The chapel key.”
Matteo's key.
I understood.
Vittorio didn't merely want the children.
He wanted whatever Sofia had hidden beneath that chapel.
“What is inside the final room?”
Alessandra paused.
May you like
Then she said:
“Enough evidence to put every Moretti left alive in prison.”
