Chapter 6 - Francesca's Second PhoneFrancesca Vale had learned to live with two versions of herself.
There was the woman patients met in her office: calm, observant, and careful with her words. She listened when others spoke. She never hurried a confession. She understood that people often revealed the truth not when they were being questioned, but when they believed nobody was trying to extract it.
Then there was the woman who opened a second phone after midnight.
That woman had spent six months gathering information from Chicago's most powerful criminal family.
She had told herself there was a difference between understanding a man and betraying him.
She had also told herself that nobody would get hurt.
Tonight, both excuses sounded pathetic.
Francesca sat at her kitchen table with the lights turned off. A single lamp illuminated the phone beside her cup of untouched tea. The message about Elena remained on the screen.
Bring her to us before Dominic finds her.
She typed a reply.
I don't know where she is.
The answer arrived almost immediately.
Then find out.
Francesca rubbed her eyes.
“You said the wife wasn't part of this,” she whispered, although the apartment was empty.
She had been recruited by a man who called himself Carlo. He had approached her two years earlier, shortly after she began treating high-profile clients. He knew about Luca, about the unanswered questions surrounding her brother's death, and about the years she had spent trying to discover who had ordered the operation that killed him.
Carlo claimed to have documents proving that Luca had been sacrificed by the Bellandis to protect a powerful captain.
He had offered to help her uncover the truth.
In exchange, he wanted access to the people who made the Bellandi family function.
At first, Francesca had refused.
She was a therapist, not a spy.
Then Carlo showed her a file containing the original incident report from Luca's death. It included a signature that appeared to belong to Dominic Bellandi.
He told her that Dominic had ordered the operation.
Francesca had hated Dominic ever since.
She had hated him for the years of silence, for the unanswered letters, and for the photographs of his lavish wedding that occasionally appeared in the newspapers. She had hated that Luca's death had reduced her family to an old case number while Dominic became a man whose name made politicians lower their voices.
So she agreed to help.
Not by stealing documents or breaking into offices. Carlo had told her she wouldn't need to do anything so crude.
She only needed to listen.
Dominic would speak because she was a therapist. He would reveal his fears, his suspicions, and the parts of his business that he could not discuss with anyone else.
Carlo's people would handle the rest.
Francesca had believed she was helping uncover the truth about Luca.
She had not expected to become emotionally attached to the man she had been sent to study.
Dominic was difficult, arrogant, suspicious, and accustomed to control. He was also haunted by grief he could barely name. His brother's injuries, his father's death, the betrayal of relatives, and the constant fear of losing the few people he trusted had shaped him into a man who believed vulnerability was a luxury.
Francesca had watched him struggle to articulate feelings that he had kept hidden for years.
Sometimes, she had wanted to tell him the truth.
Sometimes, she had almost forgotten why she was there.
Then he would describe another security concern, another family dispute, another private conversation with his wife, and she would remember the agreement.
She would write nothing down during the session.
She would ask no direct questions about addresses.
She would wait until he left.
Then she would transmit summaries through a private consulting company that served as a financial intermediary for Carlo's network.
The information had seemed harmless when viewed separately.
A warehouse under review.
A change in guard rotations.
A meeting moved to a different location.
A captain whose loyalty Dominic questioned.
She had not been told that the information would be used to coordinate an attack.
She had not been told that Enzo Marra, the missing Bellandi captain, would provide access to the security system.
And she had not been told that Elena would become a target.
Her phone rang.
Francesca answered.
“Carlo.”
“Why haven't you responded?”
“Because you're asking me to locate a woman who has nothing to do with Luca's death.”
“You don't know that.”
“She wasn't involved.”
“You don't know what Dominic told her.”
Francesca stood and paced toward the window.
“You said the objective was to expose the men responsible for Luca. You said the information would be used to dismantle Vittorio's enemies, not burn warehouses and kill people.”
Carlo gave a quiet laugh.
“Did you imagine the Bellandi family would collapse because we sent them a letter?”
“I didn't agree to murder.”
“No one asked you to pull a trigger.”
“Don't pretend that makes me innocent.”
For several seconds, there was no response.
Then Carlo's voice became colder.
“You wanted the truth about your brother. Dominic Bellandi had twelve years to give you answers. Did he ever contact you? Did he ever apologize? Did he ever even acknowledge that Luca existed?”
Francesca gripped the edge of the table.
“No.”
“Then why are you protecting him?”
She looked at the phone.
Because the man she had been sent to manipulate was not as simple as the villain she had imagined.
Because he had spoken about his wife with a tenderness that had surprised her.
Because, despite the arrogance and cruelty that defined his public life, he had once admitted that he was frightened of becoming like his father.
And because she had begun to realize that the story she had been given about Luca's death might not be complete.
“Dominic is suspicious,” she said.
“Of you?”
“I don't know.”
“Then find out.”
“And Elena?”
“Especially Elena.”
Francesca's throat tightened.
“Why does Vittorio want her?”
“Because she was there when the old family arrangements were made. Because she knows people, names, and decisions Dominic has forgotten. Because the wife has spent twelve years beside the Boss while the rest of Chicago has been forced to watch from outside.”
“That doesn't mean she knows anything.”
“Then you have nothing to fear.”
The call ended.
Francesca remained still for several moments.
She opened the second phone and scrolled through the messages exchanged over the previous six months. One detail appeared repeatedly: Carlo's insistence that Dominic's private discussions were more valuable than his official records.
Francesca had initially interpreted that as a strategy for understanding the family.
Now she realized that the attacks might have been planned around information Dominic had shared in therapy.
A terrible thought settled in her mind.
Had she supplied the exact details that allowed the attackers to predict the convoy's movements?
Had she revealed the location of the warehouse that had burned?
Had one of her supposedly harmless summaries given Carlo the final piece he needed?
She searched the messages for the dates of the attacks.
Her stomach turned.
Three days before the ambush, Carlo had asked whether Dominic planned to attend a meeting on the southern route.
Francesca had answered that Dominic was considering changing his schedule.
She had not provided a time or address.
But the following day, Carlo had thanked her.
She had thought it was about something else.
Now she understood that every fragment mattered.
Her work had not merely helped someone study Dominic.
It had helped someone anticipate him.
She dropped into a chair.
For the first time, she saw the full shape of what she had done. The attacks were not random violence. They were the result of months of patient preparation, built on information she had provided.
She had wanted justice for Luca.
Instead, she had helped create another family tragedy.
Her phone buzzed again.
Vittorio wants the next meeting confirmed.
Francesca stared at the message.
She knew where the final meeting was supposed to take place. She had heard Dominic mention it once, weeks earlier, when he was exhausted and unusually honest. It involved three senior captains and a representative from the Moretti family.
She had never sent that detail to Carlo.
She had kept it to herself because it seemed too dangerous.
Now she wondered whether he had obtained it through another source.
She opened a secure browser and searched the name Luca Vale with the details she remembered from the original report.
Most of the results were useless.
Then she found an archived news article about the incident twelve years earlier.
The official statement named Luca as a member of a rival crew killed during a Bellandi operation.
But the article quoted an anonymous source claiming that Luca had been working undercover for a law enforcement task force at the time of his death.
Francesca leaned closer to the screen.
She read the paragraph again.
Then she opened the document Carlo had provided years ago, the one containing the supposed signature of Dominic Bellandi.
The signature was real.
The document was not necessarily what Carlo claimed it was.
She searched the article's archive for the names of the investigators involved. One name appeared in an unrelated report published several months later.
Enzo Marra.
Francesca stopped breathing.
Enzo had worked for the Bellandis. He had also been the person who introduced her to Dominic's network.
If Enzo had been involved in the operation that killed Luca, then Carlo might have known the truth from the beginning.
And if Carlo had deliberately concealed Enzo's role, Francesca had not been pursuing justice.
She had been following a script written by the people responsible for her brother's death.
She reached for her phone and dialed the number of a former colleague who had worked in a legal clinic before becoming a private investigator.
“It's Francesca,” she said when he answered. “I need a favor.”
His voice sharpened.
“Francesca? You haven't called me in years.”
“I know. I'm sorry.”
“What happened?”
“I need you to find an old case file. Luca Vale. Twelve years ago. I need the original reports, not the summaries.”
There was a pause.
“Why now?”
She looked at the messages on her second phone.
“Because I think I've been lied to.”
“By whom?”
Francesca swallowed.
“Everyone.”
After the call ended, she gathered the messages and copied them to an encrypted storage device. She didn't know whether the evidence would be enough to expose Carlo, Vittorio, or Enzo. She didn't even know whether Dominic would believe her if she handed it to him.
But she knew one thing.
She would not help them find Elena.
A new message arrived.
We know where the friend lives. You have until tomorrow night to deliver the wife.
Francesca stood so abruptly that her chair scraped across the floor.
She typed:
Do not touch Elena.
The response came back.
You are in no position to give orders.
Then another message appeared.
Tell Dominic the truth, and we'll make sure Elena is the first person he buries.
Francesca stared at the screen.
She finally understood why Vittorio wanted Elena alive.
It wasn't simply because she knew the Bellandi family.
It was because Elena was the one person Dominic might sacrifice everything to protect.
And if Vittorio could control Elena, he could control the Boss.
Francesca switched off the phone and hid the storage device inside the lining of her handbag.
May you like
For six months, she had believed Dominic was the most dangerous man she would ever meet.
Tonight, she began to understand that the person controlling her had never intended to let her survive the end of the story.
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