Chapter 9
Beneath the Council Wing
Ryan lived, though barely, and Mirella said it was only because the blade had missed anything immediately fatal by an inch. He was carried to the estate infirmary under guard. Linda was locked in a downstairs room with two men outside and a third at the window. Bianca’s shoulder took a graze from the chapel gunshot, nothing life-threatening, but enough to leave her pale and angry. Salvatore personally ordered the treacherous household guard taken to the old wine cellar, and no one asked what happened after that.
Emily wanted to see Ryan again. Salvatore denied it.
“He spoke,” he said. “That is enough.”
“It isn’t.”
“It will be.”
Then he told her the truth in the only way he knew: by moving. Within the hour, the council wing was cleared. The long paneled corridor, used for private meetings and old loyalties, was sealed. Luca brought iron pry bars. Two men lifted a carpet runner. Another found a seam in the marble no guest would ever notice.
There was a hidden stair beneath the floor.
The space below was not ancient. It had been restored recently—electric lights, a narrow hall, fresh locks, new plaster over old stone. The hidden rooms underneath the council wing were colder than the rest of the house and smelled faintly of paint and bleach.
At the end of the passage lay a chamber that made Emily stop breathing for a second.
It was a nursery, but not like the one upstairs and not like the open, light-filled room she had once dreamed of for her baby. This one looked designed by people who thought infants were assets. There was a bassinet, a changing table, shelves of formula, diapers, blankets, medicine, a locked cabinet, and a second door leading to a narrow sleeping room with restraints bolted discreetly to the bedframe.
No one needed to explain what it meant.
Carlo had not planned to frighten Emily into obedience and then improvise. He had planned for every outcome. If Emily submitted, the child could be taken quietly. If she resisted, she could be contained.
Bianca found ledgers? No—Salvatore stopped any search from becoming that. He did not care about neat proof anymore. The rooms themselves were proof enough. Mirella found syringes and medications in the cabinet. Luca found a speaking tube running upward into the chapel wall. Emily found the thing that undid her.
Folded inside the bassinet was a tiny white bonnet hand-embroidered with one word at the edge in pale thread.
Lucia.
Her mother’s name.
Emily pressed the cloth to her fist so hard her knuckles hurt. Carlo had not only built a place to steal her baby. He had wrapped it in the ghost of the woman who could no longer protect either of them.
Salvatore saw her face and turned away before his own rage could spill where she would see it.
He called for Carlo then, not to be questioned in private but to be brought before the inner family that same night. If betrayal had lived beneath the council wing, it would be dragged up into light.
Carlo did not wait to be summoned.
Half an hour later, while the hidden rooms were still being searched, one of the outer guards came running with the news: Carlo Ventresca had vanished from the estate ten minutes earlier through the chapel service gate—and he had taken Linda Hale with him.
On the nursery wall below the council wing, pinned beneath a silver safety pin, Luca found what Carlo had left behind.
May you like
A single line written in a tight, elegant hand:
When the bells ring tomorrow, the child comes to me.
