Chapter 3 - THE CELLAR DOOR
The silence in the study was suffocating.
Luca looked at the silver bracelet in his hand, then back up at me. His dark eyes, usually unreadable, flickered with a sudden, sharp intensity.
“Are you certain this is hers?” he asked softly.
“I’m certain,” I said, my voice shaking. I traced the braided silver with a trembling finger. “My father made it for her. He carved three notches on the inside. One for each of my brothers, and one for me. She never took it off.”
Camille let out a harsh, bitter laugh from the doorway. “Oh, please. It’s a cheap silver trinket. The world is full of them. She’s just trying to involve herself in—”
“Shut up, Camille,” Luca said. He didn’t yell, but the sheer force of the command made her snap her mouth shut.
He handed me the bracelet. The metal was cold, but it burned against my palm.
Twelve years ago, my mother had walked to the corner store in the rain and never came back. The police said it was a drunk driver. They never found the car. They never found her bracelet.
“Whoever sent you this box,” Luca said, turning slowly toward his fiancée, “knew exactly what buttons to push. They sent a photo to blackmail you into hurting me. But they also sent a piece of jewelry that belongs to a waitress working in my house tonight.”
Camille crossed her arms defensively. “I don’t know who sent it! It arrived by courier. The note said to stop you from going to the cellar, and to make sure the waitress saw the box. That’s all I know!”
“Why didn’t you just tell me?” Luca asked, the betrayal etched deep in his voice. “If someone was blackmailing you, why hurt me? Why not just ask for my help?”
Camille looked away, a tear cutting through her heavy makeup. “Because if I showed you that photo, you would cancel the wedding. And without your protection, my family is bankrupt. I had no choice, Luca.”
“We all have choices,” Luca said coldly. He turned his back on her, kneeling down to look his son in the eye.
“Ethan,” Luca said gently. “I need you to go upstairs with Vance. Lock your bedroom door. Do not open it for anyone except me. Understand?”
Ethan nodded bravely, though his small hands were trembling. He gave me a quick, frightened glance before running out into the hallway, where the estate manager was waiting.
Luca stood up and pulled the brass key marked 17 from his pocket.
“Sarah,” he said. “You don’t have to come down there with me. I can have a driver take you home. This isn’t your world.”
I looked at the bracelet in my hand. I thought of my father, a quiet, broken man who spent the last twelve years smelling of wood glue and grief.
“My mother’s bracelet was in that box,” I said, my voice hardening. “If the answers to why she died are in your father’s wine cellar, you aren’t keeping me out of it.”
Luca studied my face for a long moment. Then, surprisingly, he gave a short, respectful nod.
“Stay close to me,” he ordered.
We left Camille weeping quietly in the study.
The entrance to the old wine cellar was hidden behind a heavy iron-wrought door at the back of the kitchen pantry. As we descended the spiraling stone staircase, the air grew instantly colder, smelling of damp earth, old oak, and something distinctly metallic.
“My father sealed this place right before he died,” Luca said quietly, holding a flashlight ahead of us. “He was paranoid. He claimed the old families were coming for him. He built seventeen heavy steel lockers down here to hide his assets. When he passed, I opened sixteen of them. They were full of cash, deeds, and gold.”
“Why not the seventeenth?” I asked, shivering as the cold bit through my thin uniform.
“Because he made me swear on my mother’s grave to never open it,” Luca replied. “He said whatever was inside would burn our family to the ground.”
We reached the bottom of the stairs. The cellar was massive, lined with vaulted brick ceilings. At the far end, built into the solid bedrock, were a row of heavy, steel-reinforced doors.
They were numbered.
Luca walked straight past the first sixteen. He stopped dead in front of the last door.
Number 17.
I stepped up beside him, my breath catching in my throat.
Luca didn’t need the brass key he had brought downstairs.
The heavy steel door of locker 17 was already hanging wide open. The lock had been expertly picked, the metal around the keyhole scratched and scarred.
“Someone beat us to it,” Luca breathed, drawing a heavy black pistol from the holster beneath his jacket.
He nudged the heavy door fully open with his foot. It groaned on rusted hinges.
Luca shined the flashlight inside.
The locker was large, about the size of a walk-in closet. But it wasn’t empty.
Hanging from a single wooden hook in the center of the stone room was a massive, navy-blue wool coat.
I gasped, taking a step back.
The bottom half of the coat was stiff and entirely covered in dark, rusted stains. Dried blood.
“That’s my father’s coat,” Luca said, his voice stripped of all emotion. “He was wearing that the night he had his fatal heart attack.”
“That isn’t a heart attack,” I whispered, pointing to the massive, jagged tear in the fabric near the chest. “That’s a stab wound. A massive one.”
Luca slowly stepped into the locker. He reached out and touched the stiff, blood-soaked wool.
“They lied to me,” Luca whispered. “The coroner, the family consigliere. They all told me his heart gave out in his sleep.”
He reached into the deep front pocket of the coat.
He pulled out two objects and brought them into the light.
One was an ornate, heavy wooden rosary.
The other was a piece of folded, crumpled construction paper.
Luca unfolded the paper.
It was a child’s drawing. Done in cheap, colorful crayons. It showed a tall man holding the hand of a little girl with brown pigtails. They were standing in front of a house made of wood blocks.
I stopped breathing. The floor seemed to tilt beneath my feet.
I knew that drawing. I knew every jagged crayon line.
“Sarah?” Luca asked, noticing my pale face.
“I drew that,” I choked out, tears instantly filling my eyes. I pointed to the bottom corner of the paper, where messy, uneven letters were scrawled.
To Daddy, from Sarah.
May you like
Luca looked at the drawing, then at the blood-stained coat, and finally at me. The realization hit him like a physical blow.
“Your father wasn’t just a furniture restorer, Sarah,” Luca said softly, his eyes filled with a terrifying sorrow. “He was my father’s enforcer. And if this drawing was in his pocket the night he was murdered… your father was there when he died.”
