Chapter 2 - THE ROOM THAT HAD BEEN SEALED
Police arrived before noon.
Detective Sofia Ramirez brought a forensic team, a warrant obtained with remarkable speed after Mara gave a recorded statement and Victoria’s comment was documented by three witnesses.
Alessandro did not go into the cellar first.
That surprised Enzo.
It surprised Alessandro too.
For most of his life, he had believed power meant entering every room before anyone else.
Ramirez told him to stay upstairs.
He stayed.
Mara sat in the library with Mrs. Alvarez, both hands around untouched tea.
Victoria called her attorney.
No one questioned her without counsel.
Alessandro hated the waiting.
He accepted it.
At 1:43 p.m., Ramirez came upstairs.
“We found evidence someone used the cellar recently.”
Mara stood.
“A body?”
“No.”
The relief on Mara’s face was immediate and painful.
Ramirez continued. “There’s a cot. Bottled water. Medical packaging. Blood on a blanket. We also found a wall panel that opens into an old service tunnel.”
Alessandro remembered the tunnel.
His grandfather had built it during Prohibition.
It connected the mansion to a carriage house beyond the south garden.
The exit had supposedly been bricked over decades ago.
It was open.
“Someone was held there?” Alessandro asked.
“Possibly. Or hiding there. We don’t know yet.”
Mara whispered, “My mother could be alive.”
Ramirez did not promise.
“We found a strand of gray hair and a used toothbrush. DNA can be compared if you have a reference sample.”
Mara did.
Her own.
Victoria’s attorney arrived and immediately tried to remove her from the property.
Ramirez allowed it after collecting the clothing Victoria wore and her phone pursuant to the warrant.
Before leaving, Victoria looked at Alessandro.
“You are making a mistake.”
He answered, “Then evidence will prove it.”
That sentence seemed to frighten her more than a threat.
The east wing search uncovered another secret.
Behind a false wall in Isabella’s old bedroom, investigators found a narrow metal box.
It had been sealed so long that dust filled the screw heads.
Inside were letters.
Dozens.
Most were addressed to Alessandro.
None had been delivered.
The earliest was dated two weeks after Isabella supposedly died.
The latest was eleven years old.
Alessandro sat at the dining table while Ramirez photographed each envelope.
His name appeared again and again in his mother’s handwriting.
ALESSANDRO, AGE 10.
ALESSANDRO, AGE 12.
FOR MY SON WHEN HE IS OLD ENOUGH.
IF THEY TELL YOU I LEFT YOU WILLINGLY, DO NOT BELIEVE THEM.
His father, Salvatore Romano, had told him Isabella died in a car accident outside Naples.
There had been a funeral.
A closed coffin.
Alessandro had been nine.
Now a forensic technician held proof that his mother had written to him for years afterward.
He wanted to tear open every envelope.
Ramirez stopped him.
“Photograph first.”
He nodded.
Mara watched from across the room.
“You knew she wrote these?” he asked.
“No.”
“Did she ever talk about me?”
“All the time.”
He looked up.
Mara smiled through tears.
“She said you hated peas. You slept with a wooden horse beside your bed. You broke your wrist jumping from a shed because your cousin told you you couldn’t.”
Alessandro laughed once.
The sound came out broken.
Only three people had known about the wooden horse.
His mother.
His father.
And Alessandro.
“Why didn’t she come back?”
Mara’s expression changed.
“She said she tried.”
That evening, after the letters were released from immediate processing, Ramirez allowed Alessandro to read copies.
The first letter destroyed the story of his childhood.
Isabella wrote that Salvatore discovered she had been documenting financial crimes and killings ordered by Alessandro’s uncle, Domenico. She planned to take Alessandro and leave.
Before she could, she was drugged and moved to a private clinic in Switzerland under a false name.
She escaped after fourteen months.
By then Salvatore had announced her death.
She tried contacting Alessandro through a family lawyer.
The lawyer disappeared.
She tried through a priest.
The priest later told her Alessandro would be killed if she returned.
So she stayed away.
Not because she stopped loving him.
Because she believed distance kept him alive.
Mara read over his shoulder only when he invited her.
The letters eventually mentioned a daughter.
Mara.
Isabella had rebuilt a life with a man named Thomas Hale, a paramedic who knew her history and helped her remain hidden.
Thomas died six years ago.
The final letter in the box was different.
It was addressed not to Alessandro.
To Salvatore.
I KNOW WHAT YOU DID TO THE CAR.
Alessandro read the sentence twice.
His father had died in a car crash twelve years earlier.
The official conclusion was mechanical failure.
Mara whispered, “My mother told me your father was afraid of someone before he died.”
“Who?”
“She never said.”
Ramirez took the letter.
“Now we find out.”
Late that night, Enzo brought security footage from six months earlier.
A camera near the south carriage house had malfunctioned for seventeen minutes.
Except it had not malfunctioned.
Someone had manually disabled it.
The access code belonged to Victoria.
And during those seventeen minutes, a dark sedan entered the property through the service gate.
Its plate was partially visible.
Ramirez ran it.
Registered owner:
Domenico Romano.
Alessandro’s uncle.
The man who had lived in the west wing of the mansion for thirty years.
The man currently on a business trip in Monaco.
The man who had raised Alessandro after his father died.
Mara stared at the result.
“Does he still live here?”
Alessandro looked toward the dark corridor leading to the west wing.
“Yes.”
May you like
For the first time, he understood what his mother had meant.
The person she feared had never left the house.
