Chapter 12 - The Grandfather Who Never DiedFor the first time in my life, I couldn't recognize the shape of my own family's history.
My grandfather was dead. I had seen his funeral photographs, his gravestone, and the documents that recorded his passing. My father had never spoken about him without a sadness so deep that I learned to avoid the subject.
Yet here he was on the screen.
Older, thinner, his hair completely white.
Still wearing the silver watchmaker's apron.
“Is that really him?” Nico whispered.
Dominic smiled.
“Giovanni Duca. The first man to understand that a clock could hold more than time.”
I stared at the screen.
“Where is Ellie?”
“Safe.”
“Show me.”
Dominic pressed a button.
The image changed to a narrow workshop. Ellie sat at a table beside an elderly man. Her hands were free, and she was examining a brass mechanism.
The man leaned toward her and said something I couldn't hear.
She laughed.
It was the first time I'd seen her smile since the nightmare began.
My anger sharpened.
“Bring her here.”
“Not until the watch is open.”
“The watch is open.”
“Not the part your father wanted you to find.”
Dominic held out his hand.
“Give me the silver watch.”
I studied him.
“You already have the gold one.”
“I have a gold watch. You have the key.”
I removed the silver watch from my pocket.
For a moment, Dominic's expression changed. The amusement disappeared, replaced by something so intense it bordered on desperation.
He reached for it.
I pulled it back.
“Tell me why my grandfather is alive.”
Dominic's smile returned.
“Because dead men are useful. They don't contradict the stories told about them.”
He gestured toward the screen.
“Your grandfather discovered the mechanism years before Antonio did. He learned how to encode documents inside watches, clocks, and other devices. He believed knowledge should survive even when people didn't.”
“Then why did he disappear?”
“Ask him.”
Dominic nodded to a guard.
Two men approached me from opposite sides.
Nico's hand moved toward his jacket, but I shook my head.
If I started a fight inside the club, Ellie would be the first person to pay for it.
I handed Dominic the silver watch.
He examined the face, pressed the crown, and smiled when a tiny panel opened.
“Your father left the final instructions here. The original film is only half the evidence. The second half contains names that would make every powerful man in this city desperate to erase it.”
He slipped the watch into his pocket.
“Come with me.”
The guards escorted me through a private corridor and down two flights of stairs. We passed a kitchen, an empty storage room, and a steel door that opened onto an underground garage.
A black vehicle waited beneath a single fluorescent light.
Dominic climbed inside beside me.
Vittorio remained at the club.
As we pulled away, I watched the city pass through the tinted windows.
“What happens to my uncle?” I asked.
Dominic adjusted his cuff.
“He becomes what he has always been. A man who wants power without accepting the cost.”
“And my grandfather?”
“The old fool made one mistake. He believed your father would finish what he started.”
I leaned forward.
“What did my father start?”
Dominic turned toward me.
“A way out.”
The answer surprised me.
For a man who had spent eighteen years murdering, bribing, and manipulating people to preserve his power, Dominic spoke as though escape were the greatest threat imaginable.
“Antonio wanted to dismantle the network,” he continued. “Not replace it. Not control it. Destroy it.”
“And that frightened you?”
“It frightened everyone who had built their lives around it.”
The vehicle turned toward the river.
Lights from the docks flashed across the windows.
Dominic finally looked at me again.
“You think this is about revenge. It isn't. Revenge is simple. You kill the people who hurt you, and you feel satisfied until the next morning.”
He leaned closer.
“This is about what happens when a man realizes his entire empire is built on a lie.”
The vehicle stopped outside an old manufacturing building.
I recognized it from the property records in my father's notebook.
The original Duca clock factory.
Closed twenty years earlier after a mysterious industrial accident.
Dominic stepped out.
“Welcome home, Lorenzo.”
Inside, the factory's enormous gears hung motionless above rusted workbenches. Dust covered the floors, and old machines stood like skeletons beneath the rafters.
At the center of the workshop sat my grandfather.
Giovanni Duca lifted his head.
His eyes were my father's eyes.
For several seconds, neither of us spoke.
Then he looked at the watch in Dominic's hand.
“You found it.”
Dominic placed the watch on the workbench.
“I found the key.”
My grandfather shook his head.
“No. You found the lock.”
He turned toward me.
“Lorenzo, your father left you a choice. Dominic has spent eighteen years trying to make that choice for you.”
“What choice?”
My grandfather's gaze moved toward the darkened machinery.
“To become the last Duca who protects the truth, or the next Duca who buries it.”
Dominic drew a pistol.
“Enough.”
He aimed it at my grandfather.
Then he placed a second weapon on the workbench in front of me.
“Open the mechanism, Lorenzo.”
I looked at the gun.
Then at my grandfather.
Then at the silver watch.
“What happens when I open it?”
Dominic's eyes hardened.
“You'll learn why your father was worth killing.”
My grandfather reached across the bench and covered my hand with his.
His voice dropped to a whisper.
“Whatever he promises you, don't believe him. The final compartment doesn't contain money, names, or secrets about your father.”
He glanced at Dominic.
“It contains the truth about Dominic himself.”
For the first time since I'd met him, Dominic looked genuinely afraid.
And that was when I understood why he had never destroyed the watch.
He couldn't.
He needed me to open it.
Because the mechanism had been designed to reveal its final secret only to someone carrying the Duca signet ring.
Someone with my blood.
Someone like me.
Dominic raised his gun toward my grandfather.
“Open it now.”
May you like
I picked up the watch.
And turned the crown backward.
