Chapter 1 - The Blue Markers
Rachel Collins had spent fourteen months working quietly at the Romano estate outside Philadelphia because the job paid enough to keep her seventy-two-year-old grandfather, Arthur, in the assisted-living apartment he loved.
Then Gabriel Romano’s fiancée, Evelyn Hart, ordered Rachel to serve thirty-eight dinner guests barefoot.
Rachel’s shoes had been filled with tiny transparent beads.
Gabriel noticed the cuts on Rachel’s feet immediately.
More importantly, he recognized the beads.
His late father, Victor Romano, had used identical blue-threaded markers to represent twelve private financial accounts worth roughly eighty-six million dollars.
Rachel admitted she had found the markers hidden behind a grandfather clock in Victor’s long-locked library. Evelyn had discovered her with them, demanded to know how many Rachel had counted, then threatened Rachel’s grandfather if she told Gabriel.
Gabriel quietly placed protection around Arthur.
Rachel then revealed something else she had hidden: a brass key marked B-214, belonging to Victor’s private storage unit.
Security footage created an even larger mystery. Evelyn had entered the library with Gabriel’s uncle Thomas Romano—a man supposedly dead for thirteen years.
Someone had also planted an old photograph in Rachel’s handbag. It showed Victor, Thomas, and Rachel’s grandfather together outside Romano Storage on the night Victor supposedly died.
Arthur suddenly disappeared from his residence, leaving Rachel a pocket watch, a cassette, and a warning.
The cassette contained Rachel’s late mother’s voice insisting Victor had not died in the reported car accident and asking whose body had actually been inside the vehicle.
Then a guard contacted Gabriel from downstairs.
An elderly man had arrived at the estate.
He gave his name as Victor Romano.
May you like
Gabriel’s father.
The man Gabriel had believed dead for eighteen years.
