Chapter 2 - THE PHOTOGRAPH THAT SHOULD NEVER HAVE EXISTED
At 3:47 p.m., I watched the woman I loved walk into my private bathroom carrying a cream-colored envelope.
Eleven minutes later, my oldest friend followed her.
And what happened next made me question every person who had ever called me family.
“Stop the recording,” I told Raphael.
He froze the image.
Marcus Carrera stood outside my bedroom, looking both ways before reaching into his jacket.
He removed a small silver key.
“That’s your private-room key,” Raphael said quietly.
“No,” I answered. “That’s his copy.”
I had never given Marcus permission to enter those rooms without me.
But apparently, he had never needed permission.
On the monitor, Marcus unlocked the bathroom door.
He disappeared inside.
Forty-three seconds later, he emerged holding the same cream-colored envelope Isabella had carried upstairs.
He slipped it into his jacket and walked away.
Raphael looked at me.
“Dante, whatever those two are doing, it’s been happening under your roof.”
I didn't answer.
Because I was remembering thirteen months of breakfasts, late-night conversations, and Isabella falling asleep against my shoulder.
I had believed those moments were private.
Now I wondered whether they had simply been opportunities.
“Can we see what was inside?” I asked.
“Not from here.”
“Then we're going home.”
Raphael shook his head.
“Marcus has men at every entrance.”
“He has men at the entrances he knows about.”
Twenty minutes later, we entered through the old service courtyard.
Raphael had helped my father renovate the mansion nineteen years earlier. He knew which doors had been forgotten when Marcus replaced the security system.
We avoided the main staircase.
I didn't want Isabella to see me.
Not yet.
Inside my bathroom, everything looked ordinary.
The marble counter was spotless.
My shaving brush stood beside the sink.
A fresh white towel hung beneath the window.
Raphael knelt behind the toilet.
“Nothing.”
I crouched beside him.
“Check the mounting bracket.”
His fingers moved behind the porcelain tank.
Something crackled.
He pulled out a small white envelope, wedged between the tank and the wall.
Unlike Isabella's cream-colored envelope, this one had no seal.
Inside was an old photograph.
I recognized the church immediately.
St. Michael's.
Chicago.
November 2018.
My father's funeral.
I stared at the photograph.
Hundreds of mourners had attended Salvatore Moretti's funeral. Politicians, businessmen, old friends, and men who owed my father their lives had filled that church.
But the photograph wasn't focused on my father.
It showed a young woman standing near the rear pews.
She was crying.
Her dark hair was pulled into a loose braid.
Beside her stood a thin young man with his wrists secured in front of him, accompanied by two officers.
And behind them stood Marcus Carrera.
My breath caught.
“Raphael.”
He moved closer.
“Look at her.”
He studied the photograph.
Then his expression changed.
“That can't be.”
I knew the woman's face.
I had kissed it that morning.
It was Isabella.
But she looked eight years younger.
And she was standing at my father's funeral.
Eight years before Marcus supposedly introduced us.
I turned the photograph over.
Someone had written three words in faded blue ink.
Remember what happened.
Below them was a name.
Noah Vale.
I knew that name, too.
Eight years earlier, a devastating fire had swept through my father's warehouse on Halsted Street.
Three employees escaped.
My father didn't.
The investigation blamed a young security apprentice named Noah Vale for deliberately starting the fire.
Noah had been convicted.
I had never questioned the verdict.
Not once.
Now I was holding a photograph of his sister.
The woman sleeping in my bed.
The woman who told me her name was Isabella Hart.
Raphael sat heavily on the edge of the bathtub.
“Dante, there's something else.”
“What?”
“Look at Marcus.”
I studied the photograph again.
Marcus wasn't looking at the cameras.
He wasn't mourning my father.
His hand was gripping Isabella's arm.
Not lovingly.
Not protectively.
He appeared to be preventing her from stepping forward.
A terrible possibility began forming in my mind.
“Why would he bring her to the funeral?”
Raphael didn't answer.
I looked at the old photograph one last time.
Then I noticed something near Isabella's wrist.
A narrow blue ribbon.
The same blue ribbon Sophie had described seeing tied around one of the envelopes.
My hands went cold.
The envelopes weren't the beginning of this betrayal.
They were the continuation of something eight years old.
And if Isabella had entered my life because of my father's death, I needed to know one thing.
Had she come to find justice?
Or had she come to finish what someone started that night?
I slipped the photograph into my jacket.
Then I heard Isabella's voice in the hallway.
“Dante?”
Raphael stood.
I turned toward the bathroom door.
She appeared in the doorway, her face pale.
Her eyes dropped to the photograph in my hand.
And the first words out of her mouth were not a denial.
May you like
They were a warning.
“Please tell me Marcus doesn't know you found that.”
