Chapter 2 - THE MAN OUTSIDE THE DOOR
Dominic knew that voice.
Not from a recording.
Not from an old memory blurred by time.
He knew the slight scrape in the man’s throat. The deliberate pause before his name.
“Dominic.”
Anthony’s hand moved toward the pistol beneath his jacket.
Dominic caught his wrist.
“No.”
Hannah looked between them.
“You know him?”
Dominic stared at the study door.
“Gabriel Moretti.”
His uncle.
His father’s younger brother.
Eight years earlier, Gabriel’s car had gone through a guardrail north of Albany during an ice storm. Dominic had stood beside a closed coffin while his mother held Julian’s hand and cried.
Dominic had watched that coffin lowered into frozen ground.
Now Gabriel was standing ten feet away.
Hannah whispered, “He gave Madeline the envelope.”
Anthony’s expression hardened.
“You’re sure?”
“I saw him through the dressing-room mirror. Three weeks ago.”
Outside, Gabriel spoke again.
“You have thirty seconds before somebody frightened does something stupid.”
Dominic finally released Anthony’s wrist.
“What do you want?”
“The Bellini ring.”
Dominic looked at the black velvet case on his desk.
So that was why nothing had been stolen.
Not yet.
Gabriel knew the ring was inside the mansion.
But he apparently didn’t know it had already been recovered.
Dominic’s mother stepped closer.
Her face looked wrong.
Not frightened.
Guilty.
Dominic noticed.
“Mother.”
She closed her eyes.
“Gabriel wasn’t supposed to come here.”
Anthony stared at her.
Hannah stopped breathing.
Dominic’s voice dropped.
“You knew he was alive?”
“I knew he might be.”
“Since when?”
“Dominic—”
“Since when?”
“Three months.”
The answer hit harder than the invasion downstairs.
Dominic stepped away from her.
“You let me stand at his grave every Christmas for eight years.”
“I was trying to determine whether the messages were real.”
“What messages?”
She reached beneath the collar of her dress and pulled out a thin silver chain.
A tiny key hung from it.
Dominic recognized it immediately.
Her cabinet key.
The one supposedly locked in a safe-deposit box.
Anthony swore under his breath.
Dominic stared.
“You told me—”
“I lied.”
“Why?”
“Because somebody copied it.”
Silence.
His mother’s hands trembled.
“Two months ago, I found my key missing from my jewelry box. It reappeared the next morning.”
That answered how the cabinet had been opened.
It also opened something worse.
Someone had been inside Dominic’s mother’s private rooms.
Someone trusted.
“You should have told me.”
“I was afraid of what you would do.”
“No.” Dominic’s gaze hardened. “You were afraid of what I would discover.”
Outside the study, a gunshot cracked through the dark mansion.
Hannah flinched.
Gabriel’s voice remained calm.
“Twenty seconds.”
Anthony leaned near Dominic.
“The study has a service exit through the library.”
Hannah immediately shook her head.
“That hallway was in the photographs.”
Dominic looked at her.
“What else was photographed?”
“The generator room. The panic staircase. Anthony’s office.”
She hesitated.
“And this study.”
Anthony turned toward the bookcase.
“Then every escape route is compromised.”
Hannah pointed at the blue fabric.
“Not every route.”
Dominic followed her eyes.
“What do you mean?”
“The person who grabbed me during the first blackout ran toward the west hall. If that was Julian, he wasn’t stealing the ring.”
Dominic picked up the torn wool.
Julian’s midnight-blue dinner jacket.
“You think my brother disabled the cameras.”
“I think he wanted someone to believe he did.”
Anthony frowned.
Hannah swallowed.
“The security photographs showed your guards. But one picture was different.”
“What picture?”
“Julian.”
Dominic went still.
“He was standing beside a man at Grand Central.”
Gabriel spoke through the door.
“Ten seconds, Dominic.”
Dominic ignored him.
“What man?”
“I couldn’t see his face.”
“What was Julian holding?”
“A red child’s coat.”
Dominic’s mother gasped.
Dominic turned.
She had gone white.
“Mother?”
“That coat belonged to Julian.”
“When?”
“When he was seven.”
Dominic stared at her.
“That makes no sense.”
“No.” She shook her head slowly. “It makes terrible sense.”
She crossed to the desk and opened the Bellini case.
Then she lifted the ring.
Dominic almost stopped her.
But his mother pressed her fingernail against the inside edge of the signet.
A tiny panel shifted.
Anthony stepped closer.
There was a cavity beneath the stone.
Empty.
Dominic’s eyes narrowed.
“What was inside?”
His mother looked at him.
“A photograph.”
“Of what?”
“Not what.”
Her voice broke.
“Who.”
Outside, Gabriel counted softly.
“Five.”
Dominic’s mother gripped the desk.
“The night Gabriel supposedly died, he came to me before he left.”
“Why?”
“He had discovered your father was moving money without the family’s knowledge.”
Dominic said nothing.
His father had been dead six years.
There were some ghosts he had never expected to fight again.
“He gave me a photograph,” his mother continued. “He told me if anything happened to him, the picture would explain why.”
“And you hid it inside Grandfather’s ring?”
“Yes.”
“Who was in it?”
She looked toward the door.
“Gabriel.”
Dominic waited.
His mother’s next words almost vanished beneath another crash downstairs.
“And Madeline’s father.”
Hannah stared.
Madeline Cross had always told everyone her father died when she was sixteen.
Dominic’s mother whispered, “The photograph was taken two days after Madeline’s father was supposedly buried.”
A cold realization moved through Dominic.
Two dead men.
One photograph.
One missing image.
And Madeline at the center of both.
Outside, Gabriel stopped counting.
Then he laughed softly.
“You always were stubborn.”
Dominic lifted the velvet case.
“You want the ring?”
“Yes.”
“You can have it.”
Anthony turned sharply.
“Dominic—”
Dominic raised a hand.
“But I hand it to you personally.”
A long pause.
Then Gabriel said, “Open the door.”
Dominic looked at Hannah.
She stared back.
Afraid, but steady.
Dominic slipped the ring into his pocket.
Then he nodded to Anthony.
Anthony unlocked the study.
The door opened six inches.
Gabriel Moretti stood in the dark hallway.
Older.
Thinner.
A pale scar crossed the right side of his face.
But alive.
Very much alive.
And beside him stood Julian.
His midnight-blue jacket was torn at the shoulder.
Blood covered one sleeve.
Madeline stood on Julian’s other side.
She was holding the missing photograph.
And when Dominic saw the little boy in the red coat standing between the two supposedly dead men, his entire understanding of his family changed.
Because the child was Julian.
And on the back of the photograph, in his dead father’s handwriting, were four words:
May you like
HE MUST NEVER REMEMBER.
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