Chapter 2 – THE PHOTOGRAPH INSIDE THE BINDING

“My father?” The room tilted.

My father had died when I was six. I barely remembered him, only the smell of sawdust and peppermint. He was a carpenter, not a mob accountant.

“Let me see that,” Matteo demanded, reaching for the journal.

Lucia slammed her hand down on the pages. “Do not touch this table, Matteo. You have done enough.” She looked closer at the ink, tracing the faded blue letters. “I know this script. He did work for my late husband.”

I walked toward the table, my legs feeling like lead. “My father died in a car accident.”

“Did he?” Bianca asked, stepping back into the room. She seemed to be enjoying the chaos she was causing. “Because according to Matteo, your father took something very valuable from the Morettis before that ‘accident.’ That’s why Matteo married you. To keep you close until he found it.”

The breath was knocked completely out of my lungs. I looked at the man I had slept next to for seven years. The man who had held me when I cried over my grandfather’s grave.

“Matteo?” My voice broke. “Tell me she’s lying.”

He finally met my gaze. “I married you because I loved you, Sophia. The rest of it… it was business. I was protecting you.”

“By hiding this?” I pointed at the journal.

“By keeping you ignorant!” he snapped, his composure finally breaking. “If the commission knew your father stole the Palermo deeds, you would have been a target!”

Lucia pulled something from the spine of the old leather journal. The binding had come loose, and a small, folded piece of paper had been wedged inside.

She unfolded it. It wasn’t a deed. It was a photograph.

Lucia’s face drained of color. She pushed the photograph toward me.

I picked it up. It was a picture of my father, smiling in front of his carpentry shop. But he wasn’t alone. Standing next to him, with his arm slung around my father’s shoulder, was Matteo.

Matteo looked barely twenty, but it was unmistakably him.

“You knew my father,” I whispered, staring at the photo. “You were there.”

“Sophia, let me explain,” Matteo said, taking a step toward me.

“Don’t come near me.” I backed away, the photograph burning my fingers. “You told me you met me by chance at the bakery.”

“It wasn’t chance,” Lucia said quietly. She was looking at the back of the photograph.

I turned the picture over.

There was a date written in my father’s handwriting, exactly one week before he died. Below the date was a single sentence: If anything happens to me, look for the silver rosary.

I looked up at Matteo, my blood turning to ice.

Because earlier that evening, Bianca had been wearing a silver rosary around her neck.