Chapter 3 - THE SAINT CHRISTOPHER MEDAL
Leon’s attention moved from Evelyn to Marco.
Nobody reached for the medal.
Nobody seemed willing to breathe near it.
Isabella recovered first.
“That’s ridiculous.”
Evelyn looked at her.
“I bought it.”
Her voice trembled.
“For Daniel. On our first anniversary.”
Sophie stared up at her mother.
“Daddy’s?”
Evelyn immediately regretted speaking.
She knelt beside her daughter.
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“But you said Daddy went away.”
“He did.”
“Then why did Miss Bella have his necklace?”
There was no good answer for a seven-year-old.
Leon supplied the only one Sophie needed.
“That’s what we’re going to find out.”
Isabella pushed back from the table.
“I have never seen that thing in my life.”
Sophie’s forehead wrinkled.
“It came from your pocket.”
“Sophie,” Isabella said too sharply, “children sometimes remember things incorrectly.”
Leon’s chair moved.
Just once.
The sound silenced the room.
“Do not tell her what she remembers.”
Isabella looked at him.
For the first time since he had watched the surveillance footage, something passed between them.
Not accusation.
Recognition.
She knew his tone.
“You believe a child over me?”
Leon held her gaze.
“I believe evidence.”
Marco stood.
“Leon, we need to speak privately.”
“No.”
“Now.”
Leon looked at Evelyn.
“Take Sophie upstairs.”
Sophie grabbed her mother’s hand.
Before leaving, she glanced at Marco.
“Are you mad I found it?”
Marco’s expression softened painfully.
“No, sweetheart.”
“Okay.”
She left.
Leon waited until the door closed.
Then he placed the recorder on the dining table.
Isabella stopped pretending.
Her eyes went directly to it.
Marco swore under his breath.
Leon looked at him.
“Interesting reaction.”
“Where did you find it?”
“Wrong question.”
Marco rubbed a hand over his jaw.
Isabella remained silent.
Leon turned toward her.
“Whose voice were you waiting to hear when you planted it?”
She said nothing.
“Marco’s?”
Still nothing.
Leon looked at Marco.
“Was she recording for you?”
Marco’s jaw tightened.
“Yes.”
Isabella stared at him.
“What are you doing?”
“Ending this.”
“You promised—”
“I promised something different.”
Leon caught that.
“What did you promise?”
Marco looked exhausted suddenly.
“To protect your family.”
Leon laughed once.
There was no humor in it.
“You planted surveillance in my study.”
“No. She did.”
“At your instruction.”
“Yes.”
“Then explain.”
Marco looked toward Isabella.
She shook her head.
“Don’t.”
That single word changed Leon’s understanding again.
Isabella was afraid of what Marco might reveal.
Marco reached into his jacket.
Leon’s hand moved instinctively toward his own weapon.
Marco stopped.
“Easy.”
He removed an old photograph.
It showed four young men outside a restaurant in Brooklyn.
Leon recognized his father, Salvatore Moretti.
Marco stood beside him, twenty years younger.
The third man was Daniel Carter.
Evelyn’s missing husband.
The fourth had been scratched out so violently that the photograph was nearly torn.
Leon looked up.
“Daniel worked for my father?”
“He kept books for three restaurants,” Marco said.
“He was an accountant?”
“He was much more than that.”
Isabella whispered, “Marco.”
He ignored her.
“Eight years ago, Daniel found discrepancies. Money disappearing through shell vendors. He believed someone inside the organization was building a private reserve.”
“How much?”
“Eventually? Nearly forty million.”
Leon’s expression hardened.
“And he disappeared.”
“Yes.”
“Did my father kill him?”
“No.”
The certainty mattered.
“Then who?”
“I don’t know.”
Leon slid the photograph across the table.
“Who is scratched out?”
Marco did not answer.
Isabella did.
“Your brother.”
Leon looked at her.
“My brother died when I was sixteen.”
“That’s what you were told.”
Silence swallowed the room.
Leon had grown up with a framed photograph of Matteo Moretti on his mother’s piano.
Matteo had been nine years older.
Wild.
Brilliant.
Always fighting with their father.
Then came a boating accident off Montauk.
No body had ever been recovered.
Leon remembered his mother waiting beside the telephone for months.
“You expect me to believe Matteo survived?”
“I expect you to believe your father lied,” Isabella said.
Leon studied her.
The betrayal in her eyes looked different now.
Not greed.
Anger.
Personal anger.
“What does Matteo have to do with you?”
Isabella’s face closed.
Marco answered instead.
“Her mother was engaged to him.”
Leon turned sharply.
“Before Isabella was born?”
“Yes.”
That made no sense.
Isabella was thirty-six.
Matteo would have been fifty-two now.
Marco continued.
“Matteo disappeared shortly after learning your father was moving money through businesses he controlled. Years later, Daniel discovered the same accounts.”
Leon stared at the recorder.
“You said after the wedding the empire would be ours.”
Isabella’s eyes filled, though she refused to let the tears fall.
“I needed whoever was listening to believe that.”
A reversal.
The recorder had not simply been spying on Leon.
It had been bait.
“For whom?”
“We don’t know,” Marco said.
Leon’s patience snapped.
“You bugged my study to catch someone you cannot identify?”
“To see whether information spoken there appeared somewhere else.”
“What information?”
Marco looked uncomfortable.
Isabella answered.
“The Zurich account.”
Leon’s stomach tightened.
Only six people knew it existed.
Leon.
Marco.
His banker.
His mother.
His security chief, Dominic Hale.
And—
Leon looked at Isabella.
“You.”
She nodded.
“We invented a transfer that never happened. Forty-eight hours later, someone attempted to access that account.”
Leon stared at Marco.
“Why not tell me?”
“Because Daniel told me something before he disappeared.”
“What?”
Marco glanced toward the doorway Evelyn had left through.
“He said the leak wasn’t someone around the Moretti family.”
Marco paused.
“He said it was a Moretti.”
Leon thought of the scratched photograph.
Matteo.
A brother supposedly dead.
A missing accountant.
Forty million dollars.
And Isabella risking her engagement to expose someone.
Then Evelyn screamed upstairs.
Leon was moving before anyone else.
He reached Sophie’s room in seconds.
Evelyn stood beside the open closet.
Sophie was unharmed on the bed.
But her little pink backpack had been emptied across the floor.
Crayons.
A stuffed rabbit.
School papers.
Everything scattered.
On Sophie’s pillow lay a photograph.
Leon picked it up.
Daniel Carter stood outside the Moretti estate.
The photograph had been taken only three days earlier.
May you like
And across the bottom, in black ink, someone had written four words.
ASK LEON WHO HE BURIED.
