Chapter 6 - THE SECOND TIME GABRIEL TORRES WAS BETRAYED
Serafina stared at Vincenzo.
“The first time?”
The accountant nodded.
“Gabriel survived the attack at the harbor.”
Silas swore.
Alessandro stepped closer.
“You told me he died there.”
“I told you what Emilio told everyone.”
Vincenzo’s face looked gray.
“I didn’t learn otherwise until that evening.”
Serafina’s knees weakened.
Her father had lived after 2:17.
How long?
“Where?”
“Emilio brought him to the Obsidian.”
The restaurant.
The place where this had started.
Serafina remembered polishing stemware while men discussed fortunes.
She had spent six months working inside the building where her father might have spent his last hours.
“Why bring him there?”
“To interrogate him.”
Clara went pale.
Serafina’s voice became dangerously quiet.
“Did you see him?”
“Yes.”
“Alive?”
“Yes.”
“How alive?”
Vincenzo closed his eyes.
“Badly injured. Shoulder wound. Broken ribs.”
“But talking.”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“He asked for water.”
The ordinary cruelty of that nearly broke her.
Not final words.
Not dramatic revelations.
Water.
“What did you do?”
“I brought it.”
“Then?”
“He gave me the envelope.”
The torn card in Vincenzo’s hand.
“What was inside?”
“A customs manifest. Account references. Photographs.”
“Where are they?”
“Gone.”
“Emilio?”
“No.”
Vincenzo looked toward Alessandro.
“Gabriel destroyed them.”
Nobody spoke.
Serafina stared.
“Why would he destroy his own evidence?”
“Because Emilio threatened Clara.”
Her sister inhaled sharply.
Vincenzo continued.
“He had photographs of her leaving school.”
Clara had been fifteen.
Serafina’s anger became something cold enough to feel clean.
“Gabriel burned the evidence.”
“Yes.”
“And Emilio let him go?”
“No.”
Of course not.
“Then why destroy it?”
“Because Gabriel believed another copy existed.”
“Where?”
“He wouldn’t tell Emilio.”
Vincenzo looked at Serafina.
“He said, ‘My daughter knows where truth belongs.’”
Serafina closed her eyes.
Her father had loved riddles when she was young.
Not puzzles for cleverness.
Lessons.
Where does truth belong?
She could hear his voice.
Not in a safe.
Not in your pocket.
Truth belongs where lies cannot afford it.
She opened her eyes.
“In public.”
Alessandro frowned.
“What?”
“Dad used to say truth belonged in public.”
Silas looked toward the Obsidian photograph.
“Then he may have hidden the copy somewhere designed to surface later.”
Vincenzo lowered his gaze.
“There is more.”
Serafina almost laughed.
“Of course there is.”
“Emilio did not kill Gabriel at the Obsidian.”
Silas’s head snapped up.
“Who did?”
“I don’t know.”
“You were there.”
“I left.”
“Convenient.”
Vincenzo’s eyes filled with anger.
“My wife was dying in hospital.”
The room went still.
“She had cancer. Emilio knew it. He told me if I didn’t help move Gabriel, he would make sure she lost access to the private treatment Vittorio was paying for.”
There it was.
Not innocence.
Motive.
Cowardice wearing grief.
“I chose my wife.”
Vincenzo looked at Serafina.
“And your father paid for it.”
Serafina hated him.
She also understood enough to hate that too.
“What happened after you left?”
“Someone moved Gabriel from the Obsidian around midnight.”
“Who?”
“I saw a Moretti car.”
“Which one?”
“Black sedan. Old fleet.”
Silas frowned.
“Half the family used those.”
Vincenzo shook his head.
“One detail.”
“What?”
“A blue rosary hanging from the mirror.”
Alessandro went completely still.
Serafina saw it.
“Whose?”
Nobody answered.
“Alessandro.”
“My mother’s.”
His voice was flat.
Serafina stared.
“Your mother took Gabriel?”
“My mother died four years before him.”
Clara muttered, “Finally, someone who is actually dead.”
Nobody corrected her.
Alessandro walked toward the fireplace.
“My mother gave that rosary to Emilio after she died.”
Silas cursed softly.
“So Emilio moved him.”
“Maybe.”
Serafina looked at the black rosary from Gabriel’s box.
Different beads.
Different cross.
Then Clara picked it up.
“There’s something carved here.”
Tiny letters ran along the back of the crucifix.
SANTA LUCIA — 12:30.
A church.
Midnight-thirty.
Three years ago.
The night Gabriel died.
They drove to Santa Lucia before dawn.
The church caretaker was an elderly woman who remembered Gabriel immediately.
“He came bleeding.”
Serafina gripped the pew.
“You saw him?”
“Yes.”
“He asked to use the sacristy sink.”
“Was he alone?”
The caretaker shook her head.
“A man brought him.”
“Emilio?”
She stared blankly at the name.
Alessandro showed her a photograph.
“No.”
Silas.
“No.”
Marco.
“No.”
Then Alessandro reluctantly showed an old photograph of Vittorio.
The woman frowned.
“Similar.”
Not him.
“Older?”
“No. Younger.”
A younger version of Vittorio.
Alessandro.
Serafina looked at him.
He stared back.
“I was in Zurich that night.”
Silas nodded.
“I was with him.”
The caretaker looked closer at Alessandro’s photograph.
“Not this man.”
She tapped the face.
“But the same eyes.”
Serafina’s pulse climbed.
Another child of Vittorio?
Another relative?
The woman led them into the sacristy.
Gabriel had left nothing obvious.
Then Serafina noticed scratches beneath an old wooden prayer bench.
She crouched.
Her father’s handwriting.
E.M. KNOWS.
Alessandro stared.
“Emilio Moretti.”
“Maybe.”
Below it was a second line.
NOT HIS FIRST NAME.
Silence.
Clara frowned.
“Then E.M. isn’t Emilio?”
Serafina’s pulse climbed.
“What other Moretti has E as a first initial?”
Alessandro shook his head.
“None.”
Silas looked toward the inscription again.
“Not his first name.”
Meaning the E belonged to something else.
A middle name.
Serafina turned to Alessandro.
“What is Vittorio’s full name?”
“Vittorio Enzo Moretti.”
V.E.M.
No.
“What was Marco’s?”
“Marco Emilio Moretti.”
M.E.M.
Still no.
Then Vincenzo, who had followed reluctantly, whispered from the doorway:
“Alessandro’s full name.”
Serafina looked at him.
Alessandro’s face had gone still.
“What?”
Vincenzo swallowed.
“Alessandro Ettore Moretti.”
E.M.
Serafina stared at the carving.
E.M. KNOWS.
Not his first name.
Alessandro Ettore Moretti.
She turned slowly.
“You said you knew nothing about my father’s last night.”
Alessandro’s jaw tightened.
“I didn’t.”
The caretaker interrupted.
“The injured man said something before he left.”
Serafina looked at her.
“What?”
“He told the man with the gray eyes, ‘If Alessandro remembers, we are all dead.’”
The church went silent.
Alessandro’s face lost all color.
“I don’t remember meeting Gabriel.”
Silas stared at him.
“What do you mean?”
Alessandro pressed one hand against his temple.
Three years earlier.
Zurich.
A night he remembered only in fragments after a car crash on the return journey.
Sedatives.
Surgery.
Three missing days.
His eyes lifted to Serafina.
“Someone erased that week from me.”
Then the caretaker opened an old parish ledger.
Inside was a Polaroid she had saved because, she said, the wounded man had insisted she keep it.
Gabriel stood beside a younger man.
Gray eyes.
Blood on his white shirt.
Scar above his brow.
Alessandro stared at himself in the photograph.
Serafina could barely breathe.
May you like
Her father had been with Alessandro the night he died.
And Alessandro had no memory of it.
