Chương 4 - THE SECOND WATCH“Three-one-four?”
Luca stared at the numbers.
Matteo nodded.
“Mama said it.”
“When?”
“In the car.”
“What did she say exactly?”
The boy frowned with the enormous concentration of a six-year-old trying to retrieve something adults had told him to forget.
“Three… one… four.”
He looked at Elena.
“Then she said, ‘Remember.’”
Luca stood abruptly.
“We’re going to Santa Rosalia.”
Marco tried to protest.
“You can’t walk into that hospital after tonight.”
“I’m not asking permission.”
Elena folded her arms.
“You’re also not taking Matteo.”
Luca looked at her.
“He stays here with six armed guards.”
“With somebody he trusts.”
“That would be you.”
“And I’m going with you.”
For a second, irritation flashed across his face.
Then he understood.
Matteo would not stay without her.
Luca’s sister Bianca arrived twenty minutes later.
She was in her early forties, elegant even in a wool coat thrown over evening clothes.
Matteo ran to her.
“Aunt Bia!”
She knelt and hugged him fiercely.
Elena noticed the genuine fear in the woman’s face.
Then Bianca saw the bandage on Marco.
“What happened?”
“Later,” Luca said.
Bianca looked at her brother.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“Later.”
Elena watched them.
Too many secrets lived in that family.
By one in the morning, Elena and Luca were entering Santa Rosalia Hospital through the staff garage.
No entourage.
No guns visible.
Just two exhausted people moving through fluorescent corridors.
Elena’s hip was bruised black beneath borrowed clothes, but nothing was broken.
She refused pain medication.
“You really are impossible,” Luca muttered.
“I’ve known you three hours.”
“And?”
“So far, I’m comfortable with my diagnosis.”
Despite himself, he smiled.
It disappeared when they reached Paolo Renzi’s office.
The doctor was still there.
He looked sixty now.
Tired.
Gray.
And the moment he saw Luca, fear filled his face.
“Santoro.”
Luca closed the door.
“My wife arrived here alive.”
Paolo sat down slowly.
Elena watched his hands begin to shake.
“That was eighteen months ago.”
“She arrived alive.”
Paolo looked at Elena.
Recognition flickered.
“You.”
“You remember me?”
“You wouldn’t stop CPR.”
Elena felt cold.
“You told me she had no chance.”
“She didn’t.”
“That isn’t the same as being dead.”
“No.”
Luca stepped forward.
“Why was I told she died at the crash?”
Paolo looked toward the closed door.
“Because somebody wanted the time of death moved backward.”
“Who?”
Paolo said nothing.
Luca leaned over the desk.
“I can make you afraid of me.”
Elena put a hand against Luca’s chest.
“No.”
He looked at her.
She shook her head.
“You want truth, not fear.”
Then she turned to Paolo.
“Doctor, I worked beside you for eleven years. Whatever you did that night has been eating you alive ever since.”
His eyes filled.
“You don’t understand.”
“Then explain.”
Paolo covered his face.
“My daughter was nineteen.”
Luca’s expression shifted.
“What happened?”
“She had been using pills. Prescription opioids first. Then whatever she could find.”
Elena knew his daughter had gone abroad for treatment.
She had never known why.
Paolo lowered his hands.
“Someone sent photographs of her buying drugs. They told me that if I didn’t cooperate, the police would receive everything. Her university. Her fiancé. Everyone.”
“Who threatened you?” Luca asked.
Paolo looked at him.
“Vittorio Mancuso.”
Silence.
“What did he ask you to do?”
“Delay the surgical team.”
Elena felt sick.
“For how long?”
“Eleven minutes.”
“Eleven minutes can kill a trauma patient.”
“I know.”
Paolo looked at her, devastated.
“I know.”
Luca’s hand tightened into a fist.
“You killed my wife.”
Paolo stood.
“No.”
His voice cracked.
“I failed her. There’s a difference, but not one that helps me sleep.”
He opened an old filing cabinet.
From the back he pulled a photocopied trauma sheet.
“I kept this because I knew one day someone would come.”
The original admission time read 11:39 PM.
Someone had later altered the official record to 11:19.
Elena pointed.
“I took her blood pressure at 11:46.”
Luca stared at the page.
His wife had been alive twenty-seven minutes after the world had been told she was dead.
Paolo swallowed.
“She kept reaching for the nurse.”
“For me?”
“For your bag.”
Elena frowned.
“My bag?”
“She grabbed it twice.”
Elena suddenly remembered.
Her old brown leather nursing satchel.
The same bag she had dropped in the street tonight.
The same one Luca’s men had recovered.
They returned to the villa before dawn.
Bianca was asleep beside Matteo upstairs.
Marco was watching the security monitors.
Elena found her bag drying near the kitchen fireplace.
The side seam had torn when the sedan struck her.
She reached through the ripped lining.
Her fingers touched something cold.
Metal.
Elena slowly pulled out a tiny brass key.
Luca stared.
Neither of them spoke.
Stamped into the key were three numbers.
314.
Elena turned it over.
On the back, scratched by hand, was one letter.
S.
Sofia.
Luca looked at Elena.
“My wife put that in your bag.”
“For eighteen months, I’ve been carrying it without knowing.”
He took the key carefully.
“No.”
His voice was quiet.
“She made sure someone outside my family would carry it.”
Elena met his eyes.
“Then she didn’t trust your family.”
Luca looked toward the stairs where his son slept.
“No.”
May you like
He closed his hand around the key.
“She didn’t trust me.”
