Chapter 7 – THE TRAIN TICKET TO NOWHERE

Three weeks had passed since the engagement dinner.

Meredith and Daniel were in federal custody, denied bail. Nico was recovering well from his shoulder injury, spending his afternoons sitting in the garden with Isla.

The house was finally breathing again.

I was officially Isla’s tutor now. My mother’s hospital debt was completely cleared, and for the first time in years, I slept without a knot of anxiety in my stomach.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about the text message.

Daniel Mercer was just the accountant. Check the ledger.

I hadn’t told Matteo. He had finally found peace, and I didn’t want to drag him back into the darkness based on an anonymous text.

But this afternoon, while Matteo was at a board meeting, I found myself in his private study.

The police had returned several boxes of Daniel’s seized financial documents, leaving them for Matteo to audit. They were stacked in the corner.

I locked the study door, my heart pounding.

I opened the first box. It was mostly tax filings and legal jargon.

I opened the second box.

At the very bottom, beneath a stack of old property deeds, I found a black leather ledger.

It was old. The edges were worn, and the pages were yellowing.

I opened it.

Most of the entries were in Daniel’s neat handwriting, detailing the money he had siphoned from the Bellandi trust. But as I flipped toward the back, the handwriting changed. It was older, sharper, written in faded blue ink.

The entries weren’t offshore accounts. They were payments.

Massive, recurring payments dating back twenty-five years.

Payment to The Watcher – $50,000.Payment to The Watcher – $75,000.

Daniel hadn’t been stealing all that money for himself. He had been paying someone off. He was being blackmailed.

I flipped to the very last page.

Tucked into the binding of the book was a small, stiff piece of paper.

I pulled it out.

It was an original, vintage train ticket.

Dated October 14th, 2001. A one-way trip from Chicago to Boston.

My breath caught.

October 14th, 2001. I knew that date. Nico had mentioned it once when he was drinking whiskey in the kitchen. It was the day Matteo and Nico’s mother, Elena Bellandi, supposedly abandoned her family and vanished without a trace.

I turned the ticket over.

On the back, stamped in faded red ink, was the name of the shell company receiving the blackmail money.

PRICE INVESTIGATIONS.

The ledger slipped from my fingers and hit the floor.

Price.

My last name.

Before I could pick it up, the study door handle jiggled. A key slid into the lock, and the door swung open.

Matteo stood in the doorway, his suit jacket slung over his shoulder.

He looked at me, pale and shaking, standing over Daniel’s open boxes. Then he looked down at the ledger on the floor.

“Hannah?” Matteo said, his brow furrowing. “What are you doing?”

I couldn’t speak. I looked at the train ticket in my hand, then up at the man who had just saved my family.

“Mr. Bellandi,” I whispered, my voice breaking. “I think my father was blackmailing your family.”

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