Chapter 6 - My Mother Was Supposed to Be DeadThe video kept playing.
My mother was alive.
For ten years, I had visited her grave every October. I had brought white roses, wiped rainwater from the headstone, and told her about my job, my apartment, and the man I had married.
I had cried over her death until there seemed to be nothing left inside me capable of grieving.
And now she was looking at me from a dark room, warning me not to trust the man who had saved my life.
“Mom!”
I stumbled toward the screen.
“Mom, can you hear me?”
She lifted her head.
Her lips moved, but the audio broke into static.
Then the image changed.
A second woman appeared on the screen.
She was seated in a different room, her wrists secured to a metal chair. Her dark hair hung over her face, and a thin line of blood ran from her forehead to her cheek.
Vincent went rigid.
“Lucia.”
I looked at him.
“Who is she?”
“My wife.”
The room seemed to lose its air.
I remembered the words Gabriel had spoken.
You can save the girl, or you can save your wife.
I watched the woman on the screen struggle against her restraints.
“She's alive?”
Vincent didn't answer.
“Vincent?”
He reached for the edge of the table, his fingers tightening around it.
“Lucia disappeared four years ago.”
“What happened to her?”
“She was taken from a charity event. My security team found her car abandoned three blocks away. There was blood in the back seat, and the people responsible sent me photographs they claimed showed her body.”
His voice grew quieter.
“I searched for two years. Then the evidence suggested she had been killed during an attempt to move her out of the city.”
“But you never found her body?”
“No.”
He stared at the screen.
“I should have known.”
I wanted to ask why he had stopped searching, why he had believed the evidence, and why a man as powerful as Vincent Moretti had been unable to find his own wife.
But I understood the expression on his face.
It was the look of someone who had spent years punishing himself for a loss that might never have happened.
Nico moved to the control panel.
“Sir, we have two live signals coming through. They're broadcasting from separate locations, but the connection is being routed through the same server.”
“Can you trace them?”
“Not yet. The signal keeps changing.”
Vincent looked at the countdown displayed in the corner of the video.
Seven minutes and twelve seconds remained.
Gabriel's voice echoed through the speakers.
“One woman for every door you close, Vincent. One life for every secret you keep.”
Vincent leaned toward the camera.
“Gabriel, you want me? Take me. Leave them out of this.”
His brother laughed.
“Still pretending you can negotiate your way out of everything?”
“I can give you whatever you want.”
“No. You can give me what you took.”
“I didn't take anything from you.”
The laughter vanished.
For the first time, Gabriel's face became openly furious.
“You took my name. You took my company. You took my place at the table. Then you buried an empty coffin and told the world I was dead.”
“I held your funeral because your blood was on the floor and your face was unrecognizable.”
“You knew.”
Vincent stared at the screen.
“Knew what?”
“That I was still alive.”
The words struck the room with the force of a physical blow.
Vincent shook his head.
“You're lying.”
“Am I?”
Gabriel leaned closer to the camera.
“Ask your precious detective about the warehouse report. Ask her who identified my body. Ask her why the DNA records disappeared.”
Nico looked at Vincent.
“Sir, he's talking about the old investigation.”
Vincent's jaw tightened.
Gabriel continued.
“You've built an empire on secrets, little brother. But the girl has something you can't buy.”
His eyes shifted toward the camera.
“Don't you, Lena?”
I backed away from the screen.
“How does he know my name?”
Vincent didn't look at me.
“Because he has been watching you.”
“No. How does he know what my father told me?”
Silence.
I stared at Vincent.
“You knew something was wrong with my father's death before tonight, didn't you?”
He took a breath.
“I knew his name had been connected to my family's missing ledger. I didn't know you were involved.”
“You recognized the key immediately.”
“Yes.”
“And you knew my father had worked for your family.”
“Yes.”
“Then why didn't you tell me everything?”
“Because I don't know everything.”
I laughed bitterly.
“That's convenient.”
His expression hardened, but he didn't raise his voice.
“Lena, I have no reason to lie to you about this.”
“Every man I've ever trusted has given me a reason to doubt him.”
The words came out sharper than I intended.
Vincent absorbed them without responding.
Then I turned back toward the screen.
My mother was struggling to lift her head again.
I moved closer.
“Mom, listen to me. I'm going to find you.”
Her lips trembled.
Then the audio cleared.
“Lena,” she whispered. “The key is not what you think.”
I froze.
“Where is the ledger?”
Her eyes filled with tears.
“Your father…”
A crash sounded behind her.
She flinched violently.
A shadow moved across the wall.
“Mom, please!”
She looked directly at the camera.
“Your father didn't die in that car.”
The connection went black.
For several seconds, nobody moved.
I couldn't hear the alarm anymore. I couldn't hear the wind outside or Nico speaking into his radio.
All I could hear was my mother's voice repeating the same impossible sentence.
Your father didn't die in that car.
My father had been buried when I was twelve.
I had watched his casket lowered into the ground.
I had touched the cold stone of his grave for twenty-six years.
And my mother had just told me he was still alive.
I turned toward Vincent.
“Find him.”
He stared at the dead screen.
“I will.”
“Not later. Not after you investigate everything. Find him.”
He looked at me.
For a moment, I saw the man behind the reputation. Someone who had buried a brother, lost a wife, and spent years believing the evidence presented to him.
Then his expression became focused again.
He reached for his phone.
“Nico, get me every record connected to the accident that supposedly killed Paul Marlowe. Police reports, autopsy files, insurance claims, funeral records. Everything.”
Nico began issuing orders.
Vincent turned to Detective Ortiz, who had remained connected through a secure line.
“Mara, I need the original case file.”
“I'm working on it.”
“And I need to know who signed the death certificate.”
There was a pause.
Then Mara spoke.
“Vincent, there's something I haven't told you.”
His gaze sharpened.
“What?”
“The death certificate wasn't signed by the medical examiner listed in the report.”
“Who signed it?”
“I don't know yet. But the signature belongs to a physician who disappeared from the registry twenty-six years ago.”
I looked at the screen.
“What was his name?”
Mara's voice came through clearly.
“Dr. Elias Wren.”
I had never heard the name.
Vincent had.
His face changed.
“That's impossible.”
“Why?” I demanded.
He turned toward me.
“Because Dr. Wren was the physician who treated my brother after the shooting that supposedly killed him.”
A sickening cold spread through me.
The missing ledger. My father's death. Gabriel's return. My mother's captivity. Vincent's wife.
They were not separate tragedies.
They were pieces of the same machine.
And somewhere in the middle was a key my father had given to a little girl who had no idea what she was carrying.
Then Nico's phone rang.
He listened for three seconds before looking at Vincent.
“Sir, we have a location.”
Vincent grabbed his coat.
“Where?”
“The old freight terminal at Pier Nineteen.”
I felt the blood drain from my face.
I remembered rain striking a metal roof.
A door slamming shut.
My father's voice telling me to close my eyes.
And a man screaming my name.
I gripped Vincent's sleeve.
“I've been there before.”
He looked at me.
“How do you know?”
May you like
I stared at the photograph of my twelve-year-old self.
“Because I think that's where my childhood ended.”
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