Chapter 11: The Box in the Floor
Enzo arrived the next morning to move them to
a second location — the first cottage was
compromised now, its location known to at
least two dead men whose associates would
come looking eventually — and while Isabella
packed upstairs, Romeo did one final sweep of
the property for anything they might have left
behind.
Under a loose floorboard in the study, hidden
with the kind of care that suggested whoever
put it there had never intended it to be found,
he discovered a strongbox. Old, dust-caked,
clearly untouched for years. He should have left it exactly where it was and reported it to
Enzo. He didn't.
Inside: photographs he didn't recognize,
property deeds in names that meant nothing to
him, and a single manila folder, its edges soft
with age, labeled with a name that made
Romeo's blood turn to ice water in his veins.
MORETTI — Warehouse District, Contract
Confirmed.
His hands didn't shake as he opened it. That
surprised him, distantly, in the detached way
that shock always surprises the person feeling
it. Inside were fire marshal reports ruling the
blaze accidental — official, notarized, filed
away in a system that had never once
questioned its own conclusion. And beneath
those, in Salvatore Ferrari's own unmistakable
handwriting, an authorization. A payment
record. A date that matched, exactly, the one
burned into Romeo's memory since he was
seven years old, the one he'd never told
anyone, not even the therapists his adoptive
parents had sent him to as a teenager. Salvatore Ferrari had ordered the fire that killed
his parents.
He read it three times, waiting for the words to
rearrange themselves into something
survivable. They didn't. He heard Isabella's
footsteps coming down the stairs, light and
unhurried, humming something under her
breath, and he shoved the folder inside his
jacket with a hand that had finally, belatedly,
started to shake.
"Ready to go?" she asked from the doorway,
smiling, one bag slung over her shoulder, not
yet knowing that the ground beneath both of
them had just permanently changed shape.
"Ready," Romeo said, and it was the first
outright lie he had ever told her.