Chapter 3 - The Sister in the Shadows
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Lorenzo crossed the bedroom floor and shut the heavy oak door between the bedchamber and the sitting room where Dr. Silvano was packing his medical bag. At the foot of the bed, exhausted from three nights of terror, little Lily had finally fallen into a deep sleep beside her stuffed rabbit.
Lorenzo pulled a leather wingback chair right up to the edge of the mattress and sat down, leaning forward with his forearms braced on his knees.
"Drink this first," he commanded quietly, holding a glass of water with a straw to Clara’s cracked lips.
She took three small sips, wincing as the water hit her raw throat, before resting her head back against the linen pillows. Her bandaged hands lay on top of the down duvet.
"Six years you’ve worked in my house," Lorenzo said, his voice a low, dangerous vibration in the quiet room. "Six years you’ve polished my father’s silver, made my bed, and looked me in the eye every morning without saying a word. Who the hell are you, Clara?"
"My real name is Clara Santoro," she whispered, her gaze steady despite her exhaustion. "My mother was Elena Santoro—the midwife in Poughkeepsie who delivered your mother’s secret baby in the spring of 1998."
Lorenzo’s fingers tightened around the silver locket in his palm. "Sofia’s note says she hid her daughter with the midwife before my father found out the child wasn't his."
"Your father didn't just have enemies in the five families, Lorenzo," Clara said softly. "In 1997, your mother fell in love with the man your father hired to restore the frescoes in the estate chapel—a man from Florence named Julian Vance. When Sofia realized she was pregnant, she knew Salvatore would murder both her and the baby if he ever saw the child’s hazel eyes. So she faked a trip to Montreal, gave birth in my mother’s clinic, and begged my parents to raise the baby girl—Chiara—as my younger sister."
"And then Sofia came back to this house for me," Lorenzo murmured, a hollow ache opening in his chest as thirty years of lies burned away. "My father told me she ran off to Europe with her lover and never wanted to see me again. Every birthday for ten years, I waited by the front gate thinking she’d at least send a card."
"She came back that October to pack your things and take you away while your father was in Sicily," Clara said, tears glistening in her eyes. "My mother told me the whole story before she died. Sofia taught us that four-beat knock—three short, one long—so that if she ever came to our house in the middle of the night, we would know it was safe to open the door. She never came."
"Because my father returned from Sicily a day early," Lorenzo said, his jaw clenching until his teeth ground together. "And bricked her alive into the sub-cellar."
"Where is she?" Lorenzo paused, his dark eyes snapping back to Clara’s face. "Where is Chiara? My sister?"
Clara’s gaze flicked down the length of the bed to the five-year-old girl sleeping peacefully curled around the white velveteen rabbit, dark curls tumbled across her forehead and long lashes resting against her cheeks.
The air left Lorenzo’s lungs in a single rush.
"Lily?" he breathed.
"Chiara grew up as my little sister," Clara whispered, a single tear sliding down her bruised temple into her hair. "We used Julian Vance’s last name when we moved upstate so your father’s men would never connect us to the midwife. Six years ago, when Chiara was twenty-two, she was working at an art gallery in Manhattan when she met a man who belonged to your family’s circle. Before she realized who he was, she got pregnant with Lily. And three days after Lily was born, Chiara’s car went off the Bear Mountain Bridge in the middle of a clear night. The brakes had been cut."
Lorenzo stood up slowly, walking to the foot of the bed to look down at the sleeping five-year-old girl who had stood barefoot on his icy steps two hours ago asking if he had the keys to every door.
His niece. His own mother’s granddaughter—the only living blood of Sofia Bellini left in the world besides himself.
"That’s why you applied for the housekeeper job here six years ago," Lorenzo realized, looking back at Clara. "To bring Lily inside the walls where nobody would ever think to look for Sofia’s granddaughter—and to find out who cut your sister’s brakes."
"I thought it was your father," Clara admitted, her voice trembling. "Until Tuesday afternoon. When Genevieve sent me down to the blue cellar door and I found a fresh cigarette butt on the floor next to the loose stones—smoked by someone who had already been digging into that wall looking for something."
Lorenzo frowned sharply. "If my father put Sofia behind that wall in 1998, why would Genevieve and Marcus be digging into the mortar twenty-eight years later?"
"Because Sofia wasn't buried empty-handed," Clara said, reaching weakly under her pillow where she had tucked a second item before Dr. Silvano bandaged her hands. She pulled out a rusted, tarnished brass safe-deposit key stamped with the crest of a private bank in Geneva. "And neither was the man who fathered Lily."
Before Lorenzo could take the brass key, the internal house phone on his nightstand let out a shrill ring.
May you like
Lorenzo snatched up the receiver. "Speak."
"Lorenzo," came the smooth, icy voice of his stepmother, Genevieve, from the downstairs foyer. "Before you do anything rash with that bolt cutter downstairs, I suggest you look out your north window toward the gatehouse. Marcus didn't lock the gates when you told him to. He opened them for the Commission."
