Chapter 6 - THE DIARY IN the LINING
She jumped.
The words echoed in the grand, cavernous foyer, heavier than any bullet Carlo could have fired. Vincenzo rocked back on his heels as if he had been physically struck. All the terrifying authority he commanded vanished, leaving behind a man shattered by a ghost.
“No,” Vincenzo breathed, shaking his head. “No, Elena wouldn’t. She was happy. She was pregnant. The police report said there were skid marks—a struggle—”
“It was staged, boss,” Marco said quietly from the doorway. He had a tactical rifle slung across his chest now. “If Carlo wanted to take over the family, a suicide would look like a weakness on your end. A hit from a rival family? That justifies a war. It justifies Carlo stepping up as your wartime underboss.”
“She was running away from him,” Anna wheezed, coughing against the gauze pressing into her side. “I saw her. She was crying. She looked at her stomach, and she said, ‘I won’t let them turn you into one of them.’”
Vincenzo closed his eyes. A single tear escaped, tracking a clean line through the blood and rain on his cheek. Elena hadn’t been murdered by a rival family. She had chosen the icy waters of the ravine over raising her child in a mafia empire.
She had tried to save Millie from Vincenzo’s world. And in the end, she had failed.
“Why didn’t you tell the police?” I asked Anna gently, brushing the damp hair from her forehead.
“I was twelve,” Anna whispered. “I was a runaway sleeping in the woods. When Carlo’s men showed up ten minutes later to inspect the wreckage, they found me hiding in the brush. Carlo put a gun to my head. He told me if I ever spoke a word about what really happened, he’d find me and burn me alive.”
Answer one: Carlo didn’t kill Elena. He covered up her suicide to manipulate Vincenzo into a war, and he terrorized Anna into silence to maintain the lie.
“But then Millie came to the foster home,” Anna continued, her voice fading. “A few years later. She had this little silver locket. It had a picture of Elena inside. I recognized the woman from the cliff. I knew who Millie was. I tried to protect her. I tried to keep her hidden.”
I looked at Vincenzo. He was staring at his hands, covered in Anna’s blood. The weight of his entire life—the violence, the empire, the betrayal—was crashing down on him.
The estate doctor, a quiet, older man with a black medical bag, rushed through the side entrance. He immediately took over, barking orders at Marco to help him move Anna to the sterile medical suite in the east wing.
As they lifted her gently onto a stretcher, Anna reached out and grabbed my hand one last time.
“Nell,” she gasped, her eyes wide with urgency. “The doll.”
“I have it, sweetheart. Millie has it.”
“No,” Anna insisted, coughing. “The seam. I sewed it inside the seam. You have to find it before Carlo does.”
Before I could ask her what she meant, the doctor wheeled her away down the hall.
Open two: What did Anna sew into the rag doll’s seam, and how did Carlo know about it?
I didn’t wait for Vincenzo. I turned and ran up the grand staircase, taking the steps two at a time. The heavy steel shutters were slamming down over the estate windows, plunging the house into a claustrophobic, artificial night. The emergency red lockdown lights bathed the hallways in a sinister glow.
I reached Millie’s room and threw the door open.
Millie was sitting in the center of her large, pink bed, her knees pulled to her chest. She had stopped crying, but her small body was vibrating with fear. Clutched tightly in her arms was the pale cotton rag doll.
“Nell?” she whimpered as I rushed in and locked the door behind me.
“I’m right here, baby,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed and pulling her into a tight hug. She smelled like baby shampoo and rain. “Listen to me, Millie. I need you to be very brave. I need you to give me the doll.”
Millie hesitated, her fingers digging into the yarn hair. “Audrey said it goes in the trash.”
“Audrey is gone,” I promised her fiercely. “Nobody is throwing anything away. But Anna left a secret message for us inside the doll. We need to find it.”
At the mention of Anna’s name, Millie’s grip loosened. She handed the doll to me.
I turned the small cotton toy over in my hands. The dress was faded, the yarn hair crooked. I ran my fingers along the back seam, right below where the blue dress was stitched to the torso.
The stitching there was different. It was thicker, clumsy—the work of a twelve-year-old girl using a stolen needle and thread.
I pulled a small pair of nail scissors from my apron pocket and carefully snipped the thick black thread.
I reached inside the cotton stuffing and pulled out a small, tightly rolled piece of glossy paper.
I unrolled it under the glow of the princess nightlight.
It was a photograph. But not the one of Millie and Anna on the garden bench.
It was a security camera still, printed on glossy photo paper. The timestamp in the corner read five years ago.
It showed Carlo standing in an alleyway, handing a thick manila envelope to a man in a police uniform.
May you like
I flipped the photo over. On the back, in Carlo’s own jagged handwriting, was a ledger entry: $500,000 to Captain Miller. Cause of death ruling: Homicide by rival syndicate.
Cliffhanger: The heavy oak door of Millie’s bedroom suddenly rattled. The handle turned violently. Then, the wood splintered as three bullet holes blew right through the center of the door.
