Chapter 3 - The Dead Man’s SecretAdrian read the message three times.
Each time, the words seemed less believable.
His father, Dominic Moretti, had died five years earlier at sixty-two.
A heart attack.
That was what the physician said.
That was what the death certificate said.
That was what Adrian had accepted while standing beside a hospital bed at 2:17 in the morning, watching nurses disconnect machines.
Dominic had smoked cigars for thirty years.
He drank bourbon.
He slept five hours a night.
A heart attack had not seemed suspicious.
Until now.
Adrian carried Elena’s phone upstairs.
He found her in the east guest suite with Lily asleep against her.
A doctor Adrian trusted had examined Elena privately.
Dehydration.
Bruising.
A sprained wrist.
Nothing permanently damaging.
Physically.
Emotionally was another question.
When Adrian showed her the message, all color disappeared from her face.
“You found it.”
“What does it mean?”
Elena looked toward Lily.
Adrian understood.
He stepped into the sitting room.
Elena followed and closed the bedroom door.
“I didn’t know whether it was real,” she said.
“What?”
“Your father’s medical record.”
Adrian’s voice became quiet.
“Where did you see it?”
“In Thomas’s folder.”
She described a photocopy of an old toxicology panel.
Dominic Moretti’s blood had contained digoxin at an unusually high concentration.
Adrian knew the medication.
His grandmother had taken it for heart problems.
His father had not.
“Are you sure?”
“I took a picture.”
“Show me.”
Elena unlocked the phone’s hidden photo folder.
There were forty-three images.
Bank transfers.
Contracts.
Private emails photographed from printed pages.
And then the medical report.
Adrian enlarged it.
Dominic Moretti.
Date of death.
Blood concentration.
Beside the number was a handwritten notation:
Enough?
Below it:
V.H. — confirmed.
Victor Hale.
Adrian stopped breathing for a moment.
Elena touched his arm.
He moved away instinctively.
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
It wasn’t.
Nothing was.
He went to the study and ordered Marco to bring Victor.
Thomas remained locked in another suite.
Victor entered without restraints, though two armed guards accompanied him.
Adrian didn’t want his men seeing him behave like a frightened tyrant.
He wanted Victor to understand that fourteen years of friendship earned him exactly one privilege.
The opportunity to tell the truth.
Adrian laid the photograph on the desk.
Victor stared at it.
His shoulders dropped.
“That isn’t what you think.”
Adrian almost laughed.
“People say that when it’s exactly what I think.”
“Your father wasn’t murdered.”
“Explain the digoxin.”
“He took it himself.”
Adrian stood.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“My father didn’t have a prescription.”
“He didn’t need one.”
Victor looked toward the guards.
“Alone.”
Adrian considered it.
Then dismissed them.
When the door closed, Victor walked to the window.
“Dominic was sick.”
“He had heart disease.”
“Cancer.”
Adrian froze.
“Pancreatic. Advanced.”
“That’s impossible.”
“He hid it.”
“From me?”
“From almost everyone.”
Victor turned.
“He found out eight weeks before he died.”
Adrian remembered those weeks.
His father had seemed tired.
Short-tempered.
He had lost weight.
They assumed it was stress.
“He refused treatment?”
“He said treatment would buy months, maybe a year, and leave him weak in front of his enemies.”
Adrian felt anger rising.
“What does that have to do with digoxin?”
Victor looked miserable.
“He asked me for something.”
Adrian’s stomach tightened.
“No.”
“He chose the night.”
“No.”
“He wrote letters.”
“Where?”
Victor lowered his eyes.
“I destroyed mine.”
Adrian crossed the room and slammed Victor against the wall.
“You expect me to believe my father ordered you to kill him?”
“He ordered me to help him die.”
Adrian’s fist tightened in Victor’s shirt.
“Why would he do that?”
“Because he was terrified Serrano would discover the cancer and move against the family before you were ready.”
Adrian released him.
Victor straightened his collar.
“There were seven people in the room when he told me. His attorney. His doctor. Father Callahan. Two council members. Me.”
“And the seventh?”
Victor hesitated.
“Thomas.”
Adrian turned slowly.
“Thomas knew?”
“He was there.”
That hurt more than expected.
His younger brother had watched their father dying while Adrian remained ignorant.
“Why not me?”
“Dominic said you would stop him.”
“He was right.”
“Yes.”
Victor’s answer came without hesitation.
“That’s why he excluded you.”
Adrian looked at the photograph again.
“Then why does this report exist?”
“Insurance.”
“Against whom?”
“Me.”
Victor smiled faintly.
“Your father trusted no one completely. Not even me.”
Adrian hated how plausible that sounded.
Dominic Moretti had loved his sons.
But trust?
Trust had always been conditional.
Victor said the documents had been stored in a private archive controlled by the family attorney, Samuel Pierce.
Thomas should never have had a copy.
“Unless he stole it,” Adrian said.
“Or Pierce gave it to him.”
Adrian called Pierce.
No answer.
Again.
Nothing.
Marco entered two minutes later.
“Mr. Moretti?”
“What?”
“We found Samuel Pierce.”
Adrian knew by his face.
“Where?”
“In his car at a parking garage downtown.”
“Alive?”
Marco shook his head.
A single gunshot.
Police were calling it an apparent suicide.
Adrian did not believe in coincidences.
Especially not suicides that occurred twenty-four hours before a secret vote.
By midnight, Blackthorne Manor had become a command center.
Adrian isolated every security system from external access.
He replaced Victor’s men with guards whose families had worked for the Morettis for decades.
He contacted two alliance members discreetly.
Neither admitted knowledge of a vote.
That meant either Victor had lied…
or Thomas had purchased more silence than Adrian realized.
At 1:30 a.m., Adrian questioned Thomas.
His brother sat beside the fireplace drinking water as though he were attending a business meeting.
“Did Dad kill himself?”
Thomas stared at him.
“Victor told you.”
“Answer.”
“Yes.”
“And you knew.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because for once Dad trusted me with something instead of you.”
There it was.
Not grief.
Not shame.
Resentment.
Five years old and still alive.
Thomas leaned back.
“You were always the son.”
“We’re both his sons.”
“No. I was the spare.”
Adrian remained silent.
Thomas laughed.
“You got the company. The house. The chair at the alliance. His private accounts. His respect.”
“You got twenty million dollars.”
“And you got a kingdom.”
“You lost thirteen million gambling.”
“Because money isn’t power.”
Adrian studied him.
“So you decided to take mine.”
Thomas’s eyes sharpened.
“I decided to stop living beneath you.”
“By kidnapping a maid?”
“That was Victor.”
“Victor says it was you.”
“Of course he does.”
Adrian leaned forward.
“Did you kill Samuel Pierce?”
Thomas’s expression changed.
Only slightly.
But enough.
“No.”
“Who did?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did Serrano?”
Thomas stood.
“This is bigger than Serrano.”
Adrian didn’t move.
Thomas approached until the desk separated them.
“You still think you’re fighting over money.”
“What am I fighting over?”
“Survival.”
Thomas lowered his voice.
“Dad’s old arrangement is collapsing. The alliance is collapsing. Half the people who shake your hand want you dead because you’re trying to turn legitimate.”
Adrian had spent five years moving the family wealth away from extortion, drugs, and illegal gambling into construction, shipping, hotels, cybersecurity, and energy.
Some called it modernization.
Others called it betrayal.
Thomas continued.
“You think you can build hospitals and luxury towers and suddenly wash the name Moretti clean?”
“No.”
Adrian’s voice remained calm.
“I think our children shouldn’t inherit graves.”
Thomas laughed.
“You don’t have children.”
Adrian thought of Lily sleeping upstairs.
“No. But some people around us do.”
Thomas’s smile faded.
Adrian asked one last question.
“Where is Elena’s evidence?”
“I don’t know.”
“She photographed your files.”
“Then you already have it.”
“Not all of it.”
Thomas’s face became unreadable.
That was confirmation.
There was more.
Adrian left.
At three in the morning, he found Elena awake in the kitchen making warm milk for Lily.
“You should be resting.”
“I tried.”
She looked toward the door.
“Every time I close my eyes, I hear that lock.”
Adrian understood more than he wanted to.
He sat across from her.
“Thomas says there’s more evidence.”
Elena’s hand stopped around the mug.
“There is.”
“Where?”
She looked at him carefully.
“You won’t like it.”
“I stopped expecting to.”
“The night I found the folder, someone came into the room.”
“Who?”
“I hid in the closet.”
She had heard Thomas speaking with another person.
Not Victor.
A woman.
They discussed Adrian’s alliance meeting and the transfer of voting proxies.
Elena couldn’t see the woman’s face, but she photographed her handbag through a narrow opening.
A distinctive white leather bag with a gold falcon clasp.
Adrian knew it instantly.
He had purchased it in Paris six months earlier.
For the woman he planned to marry.
Sofia Laurent.
Elena watched the recognition move across his face.
“I’m sorry.”
Adrian said nothing.
Sofia had been in his life three years.
Elegant.
Educated.
Patient with his difficult world.
She was the first person who convinced him he might be more than Dominic Moretti’s heir.
They were supposed to announce their engagement publicly in two weeks.
“She’s involved?”
“I only know she was in the room.”
Elena opened another photograph.
A reflection in a mirror.
Thomas at his desk.
And behind him, slightly blurred but unmistakable, Sofia.
Adrian stared.
Then his phone rang.
Sofia.
He looked at the screen.
Elena whispered, “Don’t answer.”
Adrian answered.
“Hello?”
Sofia’s voice trembled.
“Adrian, thank God.”
“What happened?”
“I think someone is inside my apartment.”
Adrian stood.
Then he heard glass break through the phone.
Sofia screamed.
The call ended.
Twenty minutes later Adrian reached her penthouse.
The front door was open.
Furniture overturned.
A lamp shattered.
Blood on the floor.
But no Sofia.
Only one message had been written across the living-room mirror in red lipstick.
COME TO THE VOTE ALONE.
And beneath it:
OR THE WOMAN DIES.
Adrian stared at the message.
Marco said, “Boss, they took Miss Laurent.”
Adrian looked at the blood.
Then he noticed something.
The smear marks were wrong.
Too neat.
Too deliberate.
And on the marble beside the broken lamp lay a tiny white price sticker.
From a theatrical supply store.
Adrian crouched.
Touched the blood.
Rubbed it between his fingers.
Syrup.
Coloring.
Fake.
He stood.
Sofia had not been kidnapped.
She had staged it.
May you like
And suddenly the alliance meeting tomorrow night stopped looking like a trap.
It looked like an execution.
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