Chapter 6 - THE SECRET IN THE SAFE DEPOSIT BOX
"You're lying," I said, my voice trembling so violently that Leah whimpered against my neck. "Julian was my husband! I never looked at another man in my entire life!"
Arthur coughed as Damian eased the pressure on his windpipe by a fraction of an inch. "Your husband was sterile from a childhood fever, Clara. Check the clinic’s vault with this key if you don't believe me. You went to the St. Jude Clinic eight months before your husband died for a routine fertility treatment, didn't you? A simple procedure to help you two conceive?"
The room spun around me. My knees buckled, and I sank onto the edge of Elena’s dusty bed, still holding Leah tightly against my chest.
"How do you know that?" I whispered, my throat bone-dry. "Julian and I never told a soul. The doctor told us Julian’s count was just slightly low—he said it was a standard intrauterine procedure using Julian’s own sample!"
"Dr. Lindqvist worked for Donna Livia," Arthur rasped, his eyes darting between me and Damian. "Elena had already refused to carry a child for Damian. She hated him. She was planning to run away to Argentina with her lover, a polo player from Madrid. But before she left, Livia forced Damian to bank a sample at the clinic in Zurich—telling him they would use a surrogate."
Damian froze. His grip on Arthur’s collar loosened slightly as the horrifying truth began to take shape in the suffocating silence of the room.
"No," Damian breathed, turning his head slowly to look at me. "Livia told me the surrogacy failed three times before Elena supposedly agreed to carry the child herself."
"There was no surrogate," Arthur said. "Donna Livia didn't want a paid surrogate who could blackmail the family later. So when a healthy, quiet orphan girl with no living relatives walked into St. Jude’s with a sterile husband, Livia saw an opportunity. Dr. Lindqvist swapped the samples during your procedure, Clara. You were carrying Damian Caruso’s biological child from day one—and neither of you ever knew."
I looked down at the little girl in my arms. The dark, thick curls that matched Damian’s. The stubborn tilt of her chin. The amber eyes that came from my grandmother.
She wasn't stolen to pretend to be a Caruso. She was a Caruso. And I had been used as an incubator by a woman who murdered my husband the moment he stumbled across the clinic payments in her cellar.
Damian looked as if he had been struck in the chest with a sledgehammer. All the ruthless authority drained from his posture as he looked at me, then at Leah. For two years, he had loved this little girl as his own—because she truly was. And the woman he had watched pour water in a cheap restaurant apron was the mother of his only child.
"I didn't know, Clara," Damian said, his voice raw and breaking in a way that made my chest ache. "I swear to you on Leah’s life, I never knew."
I looked into his dark, tormented eyes and saw the same grief that had hollowed me out for twenty-four months. He was as much a victim of Livia’s monstrous ambition as I was. "I believe you," I whispered.
Suddenly, the heavy smell of smoke drifted beneath the locked oak door from the hallway outside.
Damian’s head snapped toward the door. He pressed his palm against the wood and jerked it back instantly. "It’s hot. She’s not waiting for the police."
Arthur’s eyes went wide with panic. "What?! She wouldn't—I’m still in here!"
"You're a loose end, Arturo," Damian said coldly, snatching the brass vault key from Arthur’s hand and shoving him toward the walk-in closet. "Just like Julian was. Into the service shaft. Move!"
Thick gray smoke was already curling through the keyhole as we hurried into the closet. Damian strapped Leah tightly against his chest using a long silk sash from Elena’s wardrobe so both of his hands would be free on the ladder.
"Hold onto Papa, Principessa," he murmured, kissing the top of her head.
"Papa," Leah whispered back—her second word in two years. She wrapped her arms around his neck and reached one tiny hand back to touch my cheek as I climbed onto the iron rungs right above them. "Mama come too."
"Right behind you, baby," I promised, coughing as the smoke thickened above us.
We climbed down into the pitch-black brick shaft, Arthur scrambling frantically beneath Damian. Two floors down, Damian kicked open a rusted iron ventilation grate, and we tumbled out into the stone laundry room behind the kitchen.
Alarms were blaring across the estate now, red emergency lights flashing through the basement windows. Staff members were running toward the courtyard in their nightclothes.
Damian grabbed Arthur by the back of his belt and marched him out through the cellar doors toward a small stone garage hidden behind the olive groves. Inside sat a vintage black Mercedes sedan.
"Get in the trunk," Damian ordered Arthur, popping the lid.
"Damian, please, she’ll have me killed in prison!" Arthur begged.
"Prison is the only place Livia won't reach you tonight," Damian replied, locking him inside the spacious trunk before opening the passenger door for me and Leah.
As we tore through the rear service gates onto the slick mountain highway, I reached into the pocket of Damian’s cashmere coat—which I was still wearing—and pulled out the small brass key on the red silk cord.
"Where does this key go?" I asked as the city lights of Milan appeared in the distance below us. "Arthur said the clinic’s vault, but St. Jude is in Zurich."
Damian glanced at the heavy brass teeth of the key and shook his head. "Look at the numbers stamped on the bow. Banca Privata Lombarda—Box 409. That’s two miles from here, in the financial district. My father used that bank before he died. They have a twenty-four-hour biometric vault for major shareholders."
He reached over the console and took my cold hand in his warm one, giving it a firm, grounding squeeze.
"Livia kept all her leverage in that box," Damian said, his jaw tightening as he pressed the accelerator to the floor. "Except there’s one problem. My mother’s name isn't on Box 409. Only two people have biometric clearance to open that vault door."
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My heart skipped a beat. "Who?"
"Me," Damian said, looking at me through the rearview mirror as blue flashing lights suddenly appeared on the highway half a mile behind us. "And Elena."
