Chapter 4 - THE LOCKED WING AND THE GOLD WATCH
Damian lunged at the heavy oak door, throwing his shoulder against the wood. It didn’t budge. The old estate had been built during the war; the doors were reinforced with solid steel cores.
"Livia!" Damian roared, his fist slamming against the panel. "Open this door right now, or I swear on my father’s grave I will burn your legacy to the ground!"
"Calm yourself, my son," Livia’s voice came through the thick wood, cool and unbothered. "The girl is in shock, and you aren't thinking clearly. By morning, my lawyers and the police will be here. They will find a deranged waitress who broke into our home to kidnap your traumatized daughter after making a scene at a public restaurant. Do you really think a judge will believe her story over mine?"
My blood ran cold. She was right. I had no money, no family left, and a documented history of psychiatric grief counseling in Zurich after losing my baby. To the outside world, I would look like a grieving mother who had snapped and fixated on a billionaire’s child.
Footsteps clicked calmly away down the parquet hallway until silence swallowed the third floor.
Inside the adjoining nursery, Leah let out a soft whimper. I hurried back to the crib before she could fully wake up, patting her back gently until her breathing evened out again. When I turned around, Damian was standing in the nursery doorway, his chest heaving, his jaw set like granite.
"She won't get away with this," he said in a low voice, pulling his phone from his pocket—only to curse under his breath. "She turned on the signal jammer for the upper wing. No bars."
"How did she even know we were up here?" I whispered, wrapping my arms around myself as the chill of the old stone room sank into my bones.
"Because she runs this house like a prison warden," Damian said bitterly. He walked over to the nursery window and tested the latch. Iron security bars were bolted into the exterior limestone—installed, ironically, to protect Leah from kidnappers. "Everything Livia does is calculated. If she helped Elena fake her death and bought your baby to give to me, she had a bigger motive than just saving face."
"Your marriage contract," I said, remembering what he’d told me in the car. "What happened to your wife's dowry when she 'died'?"
Damian stopped pacing. Slowly, he turned to look at me. "Elena’s shipping shares only transferred to the Caruso family if she produced a living heir before her death. Without a child, seventy миллиона dollars in port authority reverted back to her father."
The ugliness of it hit me like a physical blow. My daughter hadn't been stolen out of love or desperation for a child. She had been stolen to balance a ledger.
"We can't wait until morning," I said fiercely, walking back into Elena’s dusty bedroom. "There has to be a way out of these old rooms. Servants' passages? Dumbwaiters?"
"The dumbwaiter in the dressing room was sealed decades ago," Damian said, though he followed me into the walk-in closet. He began running his hands along the cedar paneling at the back. "Wait. Maybe not."
He pushed hard against a panel behind a row of winter coats. With a dry groan of rusted hinges, a narrow square door swung inward, revealing a dark service shaft with an iron ladder bolted to the brick wall.
As the panel shifted, something heavy clattered off a hidden ledge inside the wall and hit the wooden floor at my feet.
I bent down and picked it up. It was a man's vintage gold pocket watch on a broken chain, the glass face cracked cleanly across the middle. The hands were frozen at 11:42. Even in the dim light of the closet, I could see dried, rust-colored stains crusted into the intricate engravings along the rim.
My lungs seized. I didn't need to open the casing to know what was inside, because I had polished this exact watch every Sunday morning for three years of marriage.
With trembling fingers, I pressed the crown. The gold lid popped open. Inside the cover was a faded miniature portrait of my mother-in-law, and beneath it, the engraved inscription: To Julian, on your twenty-first birthday.
A choked sob tore from my throat before I could stop it. I dropped to my knees on the closet floor, clutching the cold metal to my chest.
"Clara?" Damian knelt beside me immediately, his hand gripping my shoulder. "What is that? Whose watch is that?"
"It’s Julian’s," I gasped, tears blurring my vision. "My late husband’s. He wore it every single day. When the police in Zurich told me he died in that construction collapse, I asked for his watch back. They told me it had been crushed beyond recovery in the rubble."
Damian took the watch from my shaking hands and held it under the closet light, examining the dark stains along the hinge. "Clara, what company did your husband work for?"
"A private restoration contractor," I whispered, the pieces slamming together in my head with terrifying clarity. "He was restoring the wine cellar of an old lakefront villa in Zurich four months before Leah was born. He told me the night before he died that he had found old ledger books bricked into the foundation—and that the owner had offered him money to keep quiet."
Damian closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, a look of pure revulsion crossing his face. "Our Swiss villa was renovated four months before Leah was born. My mother oversaw the contractors."
Julian hadn't died in an accident. He had found something belonging to Livia Caruso, and she had killed him—then targeted me while I was pregnant and alone, tracking me all the way to the clinic like a lamb to the slaughter.
Suddenly, the floorboards in the main bedroom creaked.
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The deadbolt on the heavy oak door hadn't clicked—someone had entered through another hidden passage. A tall shadow stretched across the threshold of the walk-in closet, holding a heavy iron fireplace poker.
"Put the watch down, Clara," said Arthur—my quiet, timid restaurant manager—his voice completely devoid of the nervous stutter he’d used all evening.
