Chapter 6 – THE STOLEN RING

The heavy idle of the armored SUV rumbled beneath us, a stark contrast to the absolute stillness of the woman standing in the headlights.

“Hannah,” Ben said, his voice tight with panic. “She’s wearing your ring.”

I looked down at my own left hand. My finger was bare.

I frantically patted the pockets of my maid’s apron. Nothing.

“I… I don’t understand,” I stammered, my heart racing. “Ben, you put it back on my finger at the dinner table.”

“I know I did,” Ben said, his eyes darting from my empty hand to the woman standing in the driveway. “But she has it now. How is that possible?”

The woman in the dark trench coat didn’t move. The glare of the headlights illuminated the silver band on her finger, mocking me.

“Ben, reverse,” I ordered, a primal sense of danger washing over me. “Get us out of here.”

Ben shifted the heavy vehicle into reverse, checking the rearview mirror.

“I can’t,” Ben cursed loudly.

I whipped my head around.

Blocking our exit, parked horizontally across the gravel driveway behind us, were two black, unmarked vans. A dozen heavily armed men were pouring out of the back doors, weapons raised, completely boxing us in.

We were trapped between the iron gates and a private army.

The woman in the trench coat slowly walked toward the front of our SUV. She stopped right in front of the hood, looking directly through the bulletproof glass at me.

She didn’t look like a ghost. She looked very real, and very dangerous.

She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a small, heavy remote control.

“Hannah, she has a detonator,” Ben panicked, pointing at the device.

The woman pressed a button on the remote.

Immediately, the electronic locks on all four doors of our armored SUV clicked loudly, unlocking. The engine sputtered and died entirely. The dashboard went dark.

“She killed the battery,” Ben realized, frantically hitting the ignition button, but it was useless. The vehicle was completely dead.

The armed men surrounded the SUV. The woman in the trench coat walked around to the passenger side and yanked the heavy door open.

The cold night air rushed into the cabin.

“Get out,” the woman said. Her voice was cold, sharp, and entirely devoid of emotion.

Ben immediately leaned across the center console, trying to pull me away from the door. “Don’t touch her!”

A massive guard grabbed Ben by the collar, dragging him roughly out the driver’s side door and slamming him against the hood of the car.

“Ben!” I screamed, reaching for him.

The woman grabbed my arm with surprising strength, hauling me out of the passenger seat. I stumbled onto the gravel, clutching Elena’s journal to my chest.

I looked up at her, my eyes wide with terror and confusion.

She looked exactly like me. The resemblance was terrifying. But her eyes were harder, colder, lacking the warmth I had seen in the photograph.

“Elena?” I whispered, tears welling in my eyes. “You’re alive?”

The woman laughed. It wasn’t a kind sound.

“Elena is dead, sweetheart,” the woman sneered, looking me up and down with absolute disgust. “I’m Clara. Vanessa’s older sister.”

The world tilted violently on its axis.

“Clara?” I breathed.

“Surprise,” Clara smiled cruelly, twisting the cheap silver ring on her finger. “You thought you were the only one with a sister, Hannah? You thought Luca was the only one who could play the long game?”

I stared at her, my mind frantically trying to piece the nightmare together.

“You look like me,” I whispered.

“Plastic surgery is a wonderful thing when you have Bellini money,” Clara replied casually. “Ten years ago, when Vanessa killed your pathetic sister, we realized Luca would eventually start looking for you. He was obsessed with Elena’s memory. So, my father paid a very expensive surgeon in Switzerland to make me look exactly like the dead fiancé.”

“Why?” I cried, horrified by the sheer psychopathy of the plan.

Clara stepped closer, her breath pluming in the cold air.

“Because if Luca ever got too close to finding the truth about Elena’s murder, I was going to walk into his life, pretend to be his miraculously surviving fiancé, and put a bullet in his head while he was distracted,” Clara explained smoothly.

“But he didn’t find you,” I realized. “He found Vanessa instead.”

“Yes,” Clara sighed, looking annoyed. “Vanessa always was the pretty, charismatic one. She managed to seduce him, secure the engagement, and merge our families’ assets without my help. I’ve been living in Europe for ten years, waiting for a signal that was never supposed to come.”

Clara held up her hand, showing off the thirty-nine-dollar silver ring.

“But then, Vanessa called me three hours ago,” Clara said, her eyes narrowing. “She told me Luca had found you. She told me he had given you the key to the library. The plan was ruined. She needed me to clean up her mess.”

I looked at my ring on her finger. “How did you get that?”

Clara smiled maliciously.

“When my men raided your apartment tonight, they didn’t just smash the TV, Hannah. They found your little sonogram picture. And they found the receipt for this cheap piece of trash ring in your bedside drawer.”

Clara reached into her pocket and pulled out a receipt from the pawnshop where Ben and I had bought the ring a year ago.

“I had a replica made three hours ago,” Clara said, tossing the receipt onto the gravel. “It’s amazing what jewelers will do for ten thousand dollars after midnight.”

“You didn’t take my ring,” I whispered, the realization hitting me. “You just put a copy on.”

I frantically checked my apron pocket again.

I pushed past the brass library key, digging deeper into the lining.

My fingers brushed against a small hole in the seam of the pocket. I pushed my finger through the hole, feeling the fabric of the lining at the very bottom of the apron.

And there it was.

My real thirty-nine-dollar silver ring had slipped through the hole in my pocket when I tucked it away at the dinner table.

Ben hadn’t put it back on my finger. He had put it in my pocket for safekeeping, and I had been too stressed to notice it wasn’t on my hand.

“Why?” I asked Clara, staring at the fake ring on her finger. “Why make a replica?”

Clara’s smile faded into a look of absolute, lethal intent.

“Because tomorrow morning, the police are going to find a tragic car accident at the bottom of the ravine just outside the city,” Clara said coldly.

She pointed at Ben, who was struggling against the guards on the hood of the SUV.

“They are going to find the bodies of a poor mechanic and his pregnant wife,” Clara continued. “Burned beyond recognition. But the coroner will positively identify the wife’s body because this cheap, unmistakable silver ring will be melted to her finger.”

Clara signaled to her men.

“Throw them in the back of the van,” she ordered. “It’s time to end the Moretti fairy tale.”

The massive guards grabbed my arms, dragging me toward the dark, open doors of the unmarked van.

“No! Let her go!” Ben screamed, fighting with everything he had, but he was completely overpowered by three heavily armed men.

They tossed me roughly into the back of the cold, metal van. Ben was thrown in right after me, landing hard on the steel floor.

The doors slammed shut, plunging us into total darkness.

The engine roared to life, and the van began to move.

I crawled through the darkness, finding Ben’s hand and gripping it as if it were the only thing keeping me tethered to the earth.

“I’m here, Hannah,” Ben whispered, his voice shaking with terror and rage. “I’ve got you.”

I clung to him, tears streaming down my face. We were driving toward our deaths.

But as the van turned sharply onto the main road, I felt something hard pressing against my chest inside my apron pocket.

It wasn’t my wedding ring.

It was Elena’s leather-bound journal.

I pulled it out in the dark. I didn’t know why, but I ran my fingers over the worn leather cover, seeking comfort from the sister who had died protecting me.

As my fingers traced the binding, I felt something strange.

A hard, rectangular lump hidden inside the thick leather spine of the book.

I dug my fingernails into the ancient leather, ripping the seam open.

Something small and heavy fell into my palm.

“Ben,” I whispered in the pitch-black van, my heart suddenly racing with a frantic, desperate hope. “Do you still have the flashlight?”