Chapter 8 - NADIA’S FOURTEENTH WORD
Priscilla’s weapon remained aimed at Marisol.
Snow blew through the open chapel doors behind her.
Raphael shifted slightly.
“Put it down.”
“If I do, Vale shoots Nadia.”
“You helped create this.”
“I know.”
Father Vale laughed.
“Priscilla has finally remembered where she belongs.”
Her hand trembled.
“My father never loved me.”
“Arthur protected his family.”
“No. He used it.”
Vale’s expression changed.
Priscilla moved the weapon away from Marisol and aimed at him.
“Let Nadia go.”
Vale pressed his pistol into Nadia’s back.
“You don’t have the courage.”
Priscilla looked at Raphael.
“I did terrible things to keep my father from turning on me.”
“That isn’t courage,” Raphael said.
“No.”
Tears filled her eyes.
“But perhaps this is.”
She fired.
The bullet struck Vale’s gun hand.
Nadia dropped between the pews.
Raphael crossed the chapel before Vale recovered, driving him against the altar rail. The recorder skidded across the floor.
Luciano and federal agents entered through the side doors.
Vale was restrained.
Marisol reached Nadia first.
“I thought I could stop everyone from being hurt,” Nadia sobbed.
Marisol held her.
“Offering yourself to cruel people does not stop cruelty.”
Raphael knelt beside them.
“I taught you the wrong lesson.”
Nadia looked at him.
“You always give yourself away.”
“I know.”
“I thought that was what love did.”
“No.” His voice broke. “Love stays. Love listens. Love does not require you to disappear.”
Priscilla lowered her weapon.
Cross took it and placed her in handcuffs.
She did not resist.
The recorder contained Arthur Hail’s voice ordering Voss to install the explosive beneath Raphael’s vehicle.
It also contained Father Vale confirming the route and schedule.
The evidence was finally enough to charge Arthur with conspiracy to commit murder.
But before agents reached the Hail estate, Arthur escaped.
Voss moved him through a private tunnel beneath the property and onto a helicopter registered to an offshore corporation.
Flight records showed the aircraft heading north.
Toward the Canadian border.
Cross issued a national alert.
Meanwhile, Nadia gave her first sealed testimony.
A trauma specialist conducted the interview inside the Santoro estate, with Marisol present and Raphael watching from another room at Nadia’s request.
Nadia described the road.
The black sedan.
Voss standing beneath the trees.
The silver compass cuff link.
Then she remembered something no one expected.
“Mom was alive after the explosion.”
Raphael stopped breathing.
Initial reports stated Teresa died instantly.
Nadia shook her head.
“She was trapped. She told me to run.”
The interviewer spoke gently.
“Did anyone approach the car?”
“Voss.”
“What did he do?”
“He looked inside.”
“Did he help?”
“No.”
Nadia pressed her hands against her ears.
“He called Arthur.”
Raphael’s vision blurred.
“What did Teresa say?” the interviewer asked.
Nadia’s voice became almost inaudible.
“She said, ‘Tell Raphael it wasn’t his fault.’”
In the observation room, Raphael broke.
He turned away from the glass, but there was nowhere to hide from the words.
For three years, he had imagined his mother dying because of a careless decision he made while looking at ledgers.
Teresa’s final thought had been to free him from that guilt.
Marisol entered the observation room after the interview.
Raphael stood near the window.
“She knew,” he said.
“Yes.”
“She knew I would blame myself.”
“She was your mother.”
“I wasted three years refusing the last thing she gave me.”
“You survived the only way you knew how.”
Raphael shook his head.
“I built an empire around the belief that suffering proved love.”
Marisol moved closer.
“And now?”
“Now I don’t know who I am without it.”
She took his hand.
“You are Nadia’s brother.”
He looked at her.
“You are the man who stayed in the study when the gates were attacked. The man who signed away criminal power because his sister asked him to learn. The man who waited outside Ashwood Grove until the agents gave the order.”
“That waiting nearly killed me.”
“But it didn’t kill anyone else.”
Despite his grief, a faint smile appeared.
Marisol touched the scar near his temple.
“You don’t have to become someone different in one night.”
“What if the man I become isn’t someone you can trust?”
“Then trust will tell us.”
He turned his hand beneath hers and held it.
The gesture was small.
For Raphael Santoro, it felt more dangerous than walking into gunfire.
Luciano entered with urgent news.
Arthur’s helicopter had landed at a private airstrip in northern Maine.
From there, he boarded a cargo aircraft controlled by a Santoro shipping subsidiary.
Raphael’s face hardened.
“He still has access to our network.”
Luciano nodded.
“Someone inside the company cleared the flight.”
“Who?”
“Board director Massimo Caruso.”
Massimo had served Raphael’s father for thirty years and controlled Santoro shipping routes along the Canadian border.
Cross opened a map.
“The aircraft never crossed into Canada. It changed course over the Atlantic and disappeared below civilian radar.”
“Where would Massimo take him?” Raphael asked.
Luciano looked toward the lighthouse beyond the estate windows.
“Your family’s original island.”
Santoro Island lay forty miles off the Massachusetts coast.
Raphael’s grandfather used it during Prohibition. The abandoned fortress and underground docks had not appeared on modern charts for decades.
Arthur was not fleeing.
He was entering the heart of the old Santoro empire, where federal agents would struggle to follow.
Nadia entered the room holding her sketchbook.
On a new page, she had drawn the island.
May you like
Beneath it, she wrote fourteen words:
He took Mom from us. I won’t let him take our future too.
