Chapter 4
Security footage showed no unknown man entering through the main gates.
Daniel checked every vehicle.
Every delivery.
Every guest.
Every employee.
Nothing.
Then he found a gap.
At 9:42 the previous night, cameras covering the east service drive went dark for eleven minutes.
“System failure?”
Daniel shook his head.
“Manual reset.”
“By who?”
“Administrator credentials.”
Vittorio already knew.
“Marcus.”
“Yes.”
Marcus denied it.
His attorney spoke for him.
“Mr. Hale’s credentials are used by several supervisory employees.”
Daniel almost laughed.
“No, they aren’t.”
Marcus glared at him.
Daniel ignored it.
“His account uses two-factor authentication.”
Rachel looked at Marcus.
“So somebody had his phone.”
Marcus said nothing.
Vittorio stood near the window.
“What entered during those eleven minutes?”
“We don’t know.”
“What left?”
“We don’t know.”
Marcus finally spoke.
“You’re turning a child wandering outside into a conspiracy.”
Vittorio turned.
Marcus smiled faintly.
“Lucy gets into things.”
That sentence bothered Vittorio.
“What things?”
Marcus blinked.
“What?”
“You said she gets into things.”
“She’s three.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Marcus leaned back.
“I don’t know.”
Vittorio watched him carefully.
Marcus had made the same mistake Bianca made.
Answering a question he had not been asked.
Rachel noticed too.
“Did Lucy see something?”
Marcus laughed.
“See what?”
Again.
Too quick.
Vittorio walked out.
He did not trust himself to stay.
Later that evening Emma knocked on his study door.
She carried her phone.
“I found another video.”
Vittorio looked up.
“From breakfast?”
“No.”
Emma explained that she sometimes recorded short clips of Lucy when the child was playing.
Bianca hated it.
But Lucy liked watching herself dance.
Emma opened a video from three days earlier.
Lucy was spinning in the upstairs hall wearing pajamas.
She laughed.
Emma laughed behind the camera.
Then Lucy ran toward the window.
The video moved with her.
Through the glass, the east service courtyard was visible below.
Two men stood beside a black SUV.
Marcus.
And another man.
Only partially visible.
Dark coat.
Vittorio leaned closer.
The stranger reached for something inside the vehicle.
His hand came into frame.
On one finger was a large silver ring.
A lion.
Vittorio froze.
Emma whispered, “That’s why Lucy pointed at your ring.”
Daniel enlarged the frame.
The design was not identical.
But close.
Rachel arrived twenty minutes later.
She recognized it first.
“That’s not a Romano crest.”
“What is it?”
She stared at the screen.
“It’s Moretti.”
Vittorio slowly turned.
Bianca’s birth surname was Moretti.
Marcus Hale was her half-brother through their mother.
Their biological fathers were different.
Vittorio knew almost nothing about Bianca’s father.
He had died years ago.
Or at least that was what Bianca had told him.
“Who else has that ring?”
Rachel said quietly, “That’s what we need to find out.”
Vittorio looked back at the frozen image.
May you like
Lucy had not wandered into that garden.
She had seen a man Bianca and Marcus did not want her talking about.
