Chapter 3 - THE TORN TICKET
I didn’t wait for Dante’s permission.
I shoved past Sofia and sprinted down the grand staircase.
My flat work shoes pounded against the marble.
In the center of the foyer stood Carlo Marchetti. He was sixty-five, dressed in a bespoke charcoal suit, holding an unlit cigar.
Beside him were four massive bodyguards.
One of them was holding Lily by the back of her pink winter coat.
“Lily!” I screamed.
“Emma!” She reached out for me, crying, her small face stained with tears.
I ran toward her, but a bodyguard stepped in my path, shoving a hand hard against my chest. I stumbled backward, hitting the bottom step.
“Don’t touch her!” I yelled.
“Manners, Emma,” Carlo said smoothly. He didn’t even look at me. His eyes were fixed on the top of the stairs.
Dante was walking down.
He moved slowly. Deliberately.
Every step he took seemed to lower the temperature in the room.
By the time Dante reached the bottom, my own loyalties didn’t matter. I just wanted my sister.
“Let the child go, Carlo,” Dante said.
Carlo smiled. It didn’t reach his cold eyes.
“Dante, my boy. A beautiful engagement dinner. Shame I wasn’t invited.”
“You weren’t invited because you were supposed to be in Chicago,” Dante replied.
“Plans change,” Carlo said. He glanced at Sofia, who had hurried down the stairs to stand behind her father’s shoulder. “Especially when my daughter calls me in a panic because a maid has been digging through things she shouldn’t.”
I pulled myself up from the stairs. My right wrist throbbed violently, but I ignored it.
“Let my sister go,” I said, my voice shaking. “She has nothing to do with this.”
“She has everything to do with this,” Carlo said. He finally looked at me. “You’re Eleanor Collins’s daughter. You look just like her.”
A chill ran down my spine.
He knew my mother.
Dante stepped between me and Carlo.
“I said, let the child go.” Dante’s voice didn’t rise, but the implicit threat was deafening.
Carlo chuckled. “I’ll let her go, Dante. As soon as you hand over the envelope.”
Dante didn’t blink.
“What envelope?”
“Don’t play games with me, son. Your mother was a sentimental fool. She hid it thirty years ago. Give it to me, and the girl walks out of here.”
I looked at Dante’s back. He had the key in his pocket. He had the photograph.
If he gave them up, he would never know the truth about his mother. But if he didn’t, they had Lily.
Dante reached into his suit jacket.
Sofia exhaled in relief.
But Dante didn’t pull out the envelope.
He pulled out the train ticket. The one dated October 14, 1987.
“I don’t have the envelope, Carlo,” Dante lied smoothly. “But I found this.”
Carlo’s eyes locked onto the ticket. His jaw tightened.
“Where did you find that?”
“In the fireplace,” Dante said. “Partially burned.”
He held it up.
“It’s a ticket to Boston. For two passengers. My mother and a man named Arthur Collins.” Dante tilted his head. “Who is Arthur Collins, Carlo?”
I stopped breathing.
Arthur Collins. My uncle.
My mother’s brother, who supposedly died in a car crash before I was born.
Carlo’s expression hardened into stone.
“Give me the ticket,” Carlo ordered.
“Trade,” Dante said.
He held up the ticket.
Carlo nodded to his guard. The man let go of Lily’s coat.
Lily ran to me. I dropped to my knees and wrapped my good arm around her, burying my face in her hair. She was shaking.
“I got you, baby,” I whispered. “I got you.”
Dante held out the ticket.
Carlo snatched it from his hand. He looked at it for one second, ensuring it was real.
Then, Carlo tore the antique ticket in half.
Then in quarters.
He let the pieces fall onto the marble floor.
“Your mother was sick, Dante,” Carlo said smoothly. “She hallucinated things. Arthur Collins was a nobody. The wedding is in two weeks. Keep your staff under control.”
Carlo turned and walked out the front doors, his guards following.
Sofia gave Dante one last desperate look, then hurried out after her father.
The heavy doors clicked shut.
The foyer was silent.
Lily was crying softly against my neck.
Dante stood over the torn pieces of the ticket.
He slowly crouched down and picked up one of the torn corners.
He flipped it over.
There was something written on the back. Something Carlo hadn’t noticed in his rush to destroy it.
Dante looked up at me.
“Emma,” Dante said, his voice thick with emotion. “Your uncle didn’t die in 1987.”
“How do you know?” I asked, clutching Lily.
May you like
Dante held up the torn scrap of paper.
“Because he wrote down an address,” Dante said. “And it’s dated two weeks ago.”
