Chapter 2 - THE MAN ON THE SCREEN
The pounding came again.
Three violent blows.
Elena jumped.
Rocco reached beneath his jacket.
Adrian closed the laptop halfway.
“Stay here.”
Elena grabbed his arm.
“My mother is in that warehouse.”
“And somebody is downstairs.”
“That doesn’t make my mother less important.”
Adrian looked at her hand on his sleeve, then at her face.
“No. It makes keeping you alive more important.”
Another blow shook the door.
Then a voice came through the floor.
“Falcone!”
Victor.
Rocco glanced at Adrian.
“That’s Salerno.”
They moved downstairs.
Elena followed despite Adrian telling her not to.
When Rocco unlocked the reinforced door, Victor practically fell through it.
His expensive shirt was torn. Blood ran from his temple.
More surprising was what he carried.
A woman’s beige coat.
Elena recognized it.
“Mom’s.”
She ripped it from his hands.
A wooden rosary fell from the pocket.
Her mother had carried that rosary since Elena was a child.
Elena seized Victor’s shirt.
“Where is she?”
Victor stared at Adrian.
“You have to close Warehouse Four.”
“Where is Rosa?” Adrian asked.
“They took her.”
“Who?”
Victor laughed bitterly.
“The people you thought were dead.”
Adrian’s expression hardened.
“Blue Crescent?”
Victor looked at him.
“So you finally figured that part out.”
Elena shoved him.
“You were with my mother.”
“I was getting her out.”
“You threatened me. You grabbed me. You sent me into that basement.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Victor’s face changed.
“Because you wouldn’t leave.”
The answer struck harder than Elena expected.
Victor lowered his voice.
“Your mother begged me to make you quit.”
Elena stared.
“What?”
“She knew they were watching Luna Blue again.”
“You humiliated me because my mother asked you to?”
“She asked me to get you away from the restaurant. I chose a terrible way to do it.”
“At least you know that.”
Victor wiped blood from his eyebrow.
“I thought if you hated me enough, you’d walk.”
Elena stepped back.
Everything she had believed about Victor shifted slightly.
He was still cruel.
Still guilty of frightening her.
But perhaps cruelty hadn’t been the point.
Fear had.
Adrian noticed the distinction too.
“Where did Rosa go?”
Victor looked toward the laptop upstairs.
“You found the drive?”
“Yes.”
“Then we’re already late.”
Adrian caught his shoulder.
“Late for what?”
Victor looked at Elena.
“For them to realize she found it first.”
Silence.
Elena’s fingers tightened around the rosary.
“My mother found the flash drives?”
“Three weeks ago.”
Victor explained quickly.
Rosa had come to Luna Blue after closing. She knew about the hiding place behind the wine rack because she had helped create it decades earlier.
She found two drives.
She left them where they were because removing them would alert whoever was using the dead drop.
Then Elena accidentally took one.
“Why didn’t she tell me?”
“Because this started before you were born.”
Victor looked at Adrian.
“And because the Falcone family is the reason.”
Adrian’s jaw tightened.
“Careful.”
“You want careful? Ask your father.”
“My father is dead.”
“So is Carlo.”
That silenced the room.
Victor nodded toward the laptop.
“Play the video.”
They returned upstairs.
Elena sat this time.
Not because Adrian asked.
Because her legs no longer trusted her.
He reopened the file.
The man wearing the Falcone ring appeared again.
He was perhaps thirty-five in the recording, with dark blond hair, tired eyes, and a narrow scar beside his mouth.
Elena knew that scar.
Her childhood memories came in fragments.
A man lifting her onto his shoulders.
A deep laugh.
A blue bicycle.
Hands repairing a broken music box.
But the father she remembered had been heavier. Older. His hair already graying.
“This isn’t my father.”
The man on the video spoke.
“Elena, if you’re seeing this, Rosa finally decided you were safer knowing the truth than being protected from it.”
Elena stopped breathing.
“My name is Gabriel Bellandi.”
Adrian turned sharply toward Rocco.
Rocco whispered, “Jesus.”
Elena heard him.
“You know that name?”
Neither answered.
On-screen, Gabriel continued.
“You knew me as Daniel Marino.”
Elena covered her mouth.
The room seemed to tilt.
Daniel Marino.
Her father.
The man who taught her to ride a bicycle.
The man who waited outside every dance class.
The man whose funeral she attended at nineteen.
His name had not been Daniel Marino.
It had been Gabriel Bellandi.
“I changed my name before you were born because people were looking for me. Your mother knew. She helped me disappear.”
Gabriel lifted his hand.
The Falcone ring caught the light.
“This ring does not mean I was a Falcone. It means Anthony Falcone trusted me.”
Adrian’s father.
Gabriel leaned toward the camera.
“I worked for Anthony for eleven years. Not as muscle. Not as a criminal. I kept his books, audited his docks, and eventually discovered that someone inside the family was using legitimate Falcone shipments to move weapons and stolen pharmaceuticals through Boston.”
Adrian went rigid.
“Carlo,” Rocco whispered.
But Gabriel shook his head on-screen as though answering him across time.
“If you think Carlo was the man behind Blue Crescent, you’re wrong.”
Adrian’s eyes narrowed.
Gabriel continued.
“Carlo helped build it. But he was never the person in control.”
Elena looked at Adrian.
“Then who was?”
The recording flickered.
Gabriel held up an old photograph.
The same photograph Rosa had shown the warehouse camera.
Anthony Falcone.
Gabriel.
Rosa.
And one more person stood partly outside the frame.
A woman.
Gabriel said, “Anthony discovered the truth too late. We agreed to preserve evidence in three places. I kept one piece. Rosa kept another. Anthony kept the last.”
The video distorted.
Then Gabriel said something that made Adrian lean forward.
“Elena, four years ago, your mother arranged for you to work at Luna Blue because it was the one building Anthony believed Carlo’s people would never search.”
Elena shook her head.
“No.”
“She never expected you to find anything. She wanted you close to the evidence because she believed nobody would suspect you.”
Tears burned Elena’s eyes.
Her entire adult life suddenly felt arranged by invisible hands.
Then Gabriel’s expression softened.
“You were never bait. You were never part of this. Whatever Carlo tells you, remember that.”
The screen froze.
Rocco frowned.
“That’s it?”
“No,” Adrian said.
He moved the cursor.
There were twenty-three more seconds.
The picture returned.
Gabriel was crying now.
“Elena, there’s one more thing.”
She leaned closer.
“If Adrian Falcone is with you when you see this, tell him to look at his father’s watch.”
Adrian stopped moving.
His hand slowly went beneath his shirt.
From a chain around his neck, he pulled an old silver pocket watch.
Elena stared.
“You carry it?”
“My father gave it to me the night he died.”
Gabriel’s final words played.
“Anthony hid the name of the person controlling Blue Crescent inside that watch.”
The video ended.
No one spoke.
Adrian turned the watch over.
He had owned it for twelve years.
He had never opened the back casing.
Rocco brought a thin knife.
Adrian worked the edge carefully.
The metal popped free.
Inside was a folded strip of paper.
One name.
Adrian read it.
And all the color left his face.
Elena stood.
“Who is it?”
Adrian looked at Victor.
May you like
Then at Elena.
“My mother.”
