Chapter 3 - Your aunt knows enough to keep you safe and not enough to endanger herself unnecessarily.
Enzo knows her alias.
If I cannot reach you, he will.
But he hadn't.
Why?
The answer came two paragraphs later.
There is one complication. I no longer fully trust Enzo's household.
My eyes moved faster.
Someone has intercepted two messages between us.
Do not contact the Rossi family directly unless Enzo gives you the phrase we agreed upon.
I stopped.
Dante leaned forward.
“What phrase?”
I read it.
“Blue birds never fly south.”
He stared at me.
“That was in my father's file.”
“What?”
Dante opened a locked drawer.
He removed a small notebook.
Near the back, written alone on a page:
BLUE BIRDS NEVER FLY SOUTH — T.V.
My eyes filled.
“He was trying,” I whispered.
Dante's face changed.
“My father was trying to find you.”
“Yes.”
I reached the end.
If Enzo cannot help you, disappear.
I know that is a terrible thing to ask of a twenty-year-old.
But staying alive long enough to have choices is sometimes the only victory available.
Whatever happens, none of this is your responsibility to repair.
Do you hear me?
I smiled through tears.
He knew me too well.
You are my daughter before you are my witness.
Live first.
Explain later.
Dad.
I folded the letter.
For a long time, neither Dante nor I spoke.
Finally he said, “He sounds like a good man.”
“He was irritating.”
“Those are not mutually exclusive.”
I smiled.
“No.”
Dante looked at the photographs spread across his father's desk.
“My father tried to protect you.”
“And mine tried to protect you.”
“So naturally we spent two years distrusting each other.”
“That appears to be our fathers' greatest failure.”
“Besides their criminal accounting?”
I gave him a look.
He actually smiled.
Then reality returned.
“Margaret,” he said.
My aunt.
Alive.
Somewhere in New Jersey.
Every instinct told me to leave immediately.
Dante must have seen it.
“We don't know who monitors her.”
“She might be alone.”
“She has been alone three more hours than she was yesterday.”
“That doesn't make waiting easier.”
“No.”
His voice softened.
“But rushing because you're emotional isn't the same as helping.”
I hated when he was right.
“I'll call her.”
“From here?”
“No.”
“Good.”
We used a public number from Rosa's old kitchen telephone, mostly because nobody expected a mansion full of technology to still contain an avocado-green landline installed sometime during the previous century.
The number rang four times.
A woman answered.
“Hello?”
I stopped breathing.
I hadn't heard that voice since I was nineteen.
Older.
Softer.
But hers.
“Aunt Margaret?”
Silence.
Then the receiver made a small sound.
“Who is this?”
I couldn't speak.
Dante stood across the room, watching.
“It's Clara.”
Nothing.
Then:
“No.”
My heart broke.
“Aunt Margaret—”
“No. Don't do this.”
“Please.”
“My niece is dead.”
I closed my eyes.
“When I was nine, you let me cut my own bangs.”
Silence.
“Your mother nearly killed me.”
“She made me wear a hat to school for three weeks.”
A breath.
“Clara?”
“Yes.”
Her voice shattered.
“Oh, sweetheart.”
I covered my mouth.
For six years, I'd trained myself not to imagine family.
Hope was dangerous when you were hiding.
Now it came all at once.
We cried.
Neither elegantly.
Dante quietly left the kitchen.
He closed the door behind him.
Margaret refused to discuss anything important by telephone.
That was my aunt.
Cautious even before our family became complicated.
We arranged to meet in a small botanical garden outside Newark.
Public.
Quiet.
Neutral.
Dante insisted on coming.
I refused.
He came anyway.
Not beside me.
He waited in the café fifty yards away.
“I am perfectly capable of meeting my aunt alone,” I told him.
“I know.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because six years of hiding can create blind spots.”
“And thirty-six years of ordering people around creates what?”
“Excellent posture.”
I stared at him.
He walked away before I could answer.
Margaret arrived at eleven.
She had gray in her hair now.
That was the first thing I noticed.
The second was that she still carried the same enormous canvas handbag she'd used when I was a child.
She saw me.
Stopped.
Then pressed one hand to her mouth.
I stood.
“Aunt Margaret.”
She crossed the path.
For the first time in six years, someone hugged me who remembered who I'd been before I became Clara Bennett.
I held on longer than I meant to.
“So you're alive,” she whispered.
“Yes.”
“Your father would be furious.”
I laughed into her shoulder.
“That I survived?”
“That you took six years to call.”
That sounded like him.
We sat beneath a glass roof surrounded by ferns.
Margaret held my hand.
“Why didn't you contact me?”
“I thought you died.”
Her eyebrows rose.
“Who told you that?”
“A legal notice. Three years ago.”
She became very still.
“I changed my name after Enzo warned me someone had requested my address.”
“Enzo contacted you?”
“Twice.”
“Why didn't he tell you I might be alive?”
“He didn't know.”
That surprised me.
“He believed the official report?”
“At first. Later he started questioning it.”
“Why?”
Margaret opened her giant handbag.
From inside she removed a little black notebook.
“Because of this.”
My father's.
I knew it by the elastic band around the cover.
“He gave you that?”
“The week before he died.”
She placed it between us.
“I was instructed not to open it unless someone came asking.”
“Who came?”
“Enzo.”
“When?”
“Five years ago.”
My heart pounded.
“What was inside?”
“Numbers. Names. A key.”
“A key to what?”
“I don't know.”
“You opened it.”
“I opened the notebook, not whatever the key belongs to.”
She handed it to me.
The pages contained columns of figures.
Dates.
Initials.
Then a list of safe-deposit branches.
One line was circled.
A bank in Manhattan.
“Did Enzo take the key?”
“No.”
“Where is it?”
Margaret smiled faintly.
“Your father said nobody should have it until you returned.”
She removed a small brass key from a hidden pocket in her handbag.
I stared.
“You carried that around?”
“For six years.”
“What if you lost the bag?”
“This bag survived raising three children and two husbands. It isn't losing a key.”
I laughed.
Then Margaret noticed Dante through the café windows.
Her expression changed.
“Is that Enzo's son?”
“Yes.”
“He looks exactly like him when he's unhappy.”
“Dante usually looks unhappy.”
“He's watching us.”
“He does that.”
“You work for him?”
“Until yesterday.”
“What happened yesterday?”
“I resigned.”
Margaret looked from him to me.
“Yet he drove you here.”
“This is difficult to explain.”
“Usually that means romance.”
“It absolutely does not.”
Dante chose that exact moment to glance toward us.
My aunt smiled.
“Of course.”
I changed the subject.
“What did Enzo say when he came for the notebook?”
Margaret's amusement vanished.
“He said Thomas had been right about Giovanni.”
“And?”
“He said the Bellini accounts were worse than either of them understood.”
“How?”
“He wouldn't tell me.”
“Why?”
“Because by then Giovanni had died.”
I remembered.
Giovanni Bellini passed away five years earlier after a stroke.
“And Matteo had taken his place,” I said.
Margaret nodded.
“Enzo believed that made things more dangerous.”
My skin went cold.
“Did he say anything about Isabella?”
“Yes.”
I stared.
“What?”
“He said she didn't know.”
Relief surprised me.
“Didn't know what?”
“Any of it.”
Margaret leaned closer.
“According to Enzo, Giovanni kept his daughter away from business matters. Matteo continued doing the same after their father died.”
So Isabella might be unpleasant.
But innocent.
Two things could coexist.
“What about the safe-deposit box?”
“Enzo never opened it.”
“Why?”
“Your father's instructions required two people.”
“Who?”
Margaret opened the notebook.
On the final page, my father had written:
BOX ACCESS: C.V. + D.R.
My initials.
And Dante's.
I stared at the café.
Dante was speaking to a waiter.
My aunt followed my gaze.
“Your father apparently expected the two of you to meet.”
“Why would he choose Dante? I didn't even know him.”
“Maybe because Enzo trusted his son more than he trusted himself.”
That possibility stayed with me.
The bank appointment happened the next morning.
Dante and I went alone.
No guards inside.
No Matteo.
No Isabella.
The safe-deposit box was surprisingly small.
Inside were three folders and a flash drive.
No dramatic fortune.
No jewels.
No weapon.
Just documents.
The first folder contained financial records connecting Giovanni Bellini to fraudulent relief contracts.
The second contained correspondence proving Enzo withdrew his companies from those arrangements once he understood them.
The third was newer.
Dates continued after Giovanni's death.
Signed by Matteo.
Dante read in silence.
I looked over his shoulder.
Matteo had continued moving company funds through shell consultancies.
Not enormous amounts.
Carefully chosen amounts.
Enough to accumulate quietly.
Then I saw payments connected to medical research companies.
Acoustic engineering consultants.
Private specialists.
My stomach turned.
“He researched your condition.”
Dante's face went still.
“For years.”
There were no instructions for harming him.
Nothing like that.
Only medical summaries.
Environmental trigger studies.
Copies of information Dante's doctors had produced long ago.
But combined with Matteo's behavior at the party, the intention became difficult to dismiss.
“Why?” I whispered.
Dante turned another page.
The answer was there.
An unsigned draft partnership agreement.
If Dante married Isabella, Matteo's family would gain expanded voting rights in three Rossi companies.
If Dante became medically unable to serve temporarily, operational authority could shift to an executive council.
Matteo chaired it.
Not a grand assassination plot.
Something quieter.
Create doubt.
Make Dante seem unstable.
Encourage him to withdraw.
Acquire influence legally.
My anger felt colder than fear.
“He wanted you to question yourself.”
Dante said nothing.
The flash drive contained one audio file.
We played it on the bank's secure computer.
Enzo Rossi's voice filled the small room.
“Dante.”
Dante froze.
His father continued.
“If you're hearing this, Thomas's daughter survived, which means I underestimated her.”
I almost smiled.
“Do not blame her for hiding.”
Dante looked at me.
His father continued.
“I taught you to distrust people because distrust kept our family alive. I did not teach you when to stop.”
Something in Dante's expression shifted.
“Matteo is ambitious. That alone does not make him an enemy. Judge what he has done, not what I feared he might do.”
Good advice.
Even now.
“Isabella knows nothing about these accounts.”
Dante exhaled.
“Do not punish her for her father's or brother's choices.”
Again, the dead man was frustratingly wise.
Then Enzo's voice softened.
“There is one last thing Thomas and I agreed on.”
A pause.
“Our children should not spend their lives repairing our mistakes.”
I looked at Dante.
He looked at me.
“Use these records to end what should have ended with us.”
The audio stopped.
Neither of us spoke.
Then Dante sat back.
“So.”
“So.”
“Our fathers arranged this.”
“It appears they did.”
“I dislike being managed by dead people.”
“Something else we agree on.”
For the first time in two days, he laughed.
Then the bank officer knocked.
We gathered the documents.
Dante looked at the partnership agreement again.
“What will you do?” I asked.
“About Matteo?”
“Yes.”
“Verify everything independently.”
I relaxed.
“No confrontation?”
“No.”
“Good.”
May you like
He looked at me.
“You expected something else.”
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