Chapter 10 – The Shadow Man’s Drawing

Three months passed.

The Chicago winter gave way to a brilliant, blooming spring. The Moretti estate, once a cold fortress of mafia politics and Vanessa’s toxic vanity, was entirely transformed.

The heavy drapes were pulled back, filling the grand hallways with sunlight. The sound of classical music in the study was regularly interrupted by the shrieks of children running across the hardwood floors. Mara’s daughter, Mia, had moved in, and she and Leo had become completely inseparable.

And me?

I was living in the master wing.

My relationship with Luca had blossomed into something profound and deeply romantic. He wasn’t the terrifying boss to me; he was the man who brought me coffee in bed, the man who held me when I finally moved my mother into a beautiful, secure condo downtown, and the man who looked at me with an intensity that made my knees weak.

Everything was perfect.

But trauma rarely disappears overnight, especially for a four-year-old child.

It was a Tuesday afternoon. I was sitting at the large kitchen island, chopping vegetables for dinner, while Leo sat at the counter beside me, coloring in a sketchbook with intense concentration.

“What are you drawing, sweetie?” I asked, smiling as I watched his small hand grip the black crayon.

Leo didn’t look up. “A picture.”

I wiped my hands on a towel and walked over to look over his shoulder.

My smile faded.

He had drawn a picture of the cabin in the mountains. There were crude outlines of trees, and a small figure standing on the porch that was clearly meant to be Elena.

But towering over the cabin, drawn in heavy, aggressive black scribbles, was a massive, dark figure. It had no face, just a dark fedora hat and long, jagged arms reaching toward the house.

A cold chill ran down my spine.

“Leo,” I asked gently, pulling up a stool beside him. “Who is the big man in the picture?”

Leo kept his eyes glued to the paper. “The Shadow Man.”

“Is that Dominic? The man who took you away in the car?”

Leo shook his head vigorously. “No. The Shadow Man came before the bad man. He used to stand in the trees and watch Mommy.”

My heart skipped a beat.

Elena had been hiding in the mountains. Dominic had found her just a month before we did. But if someone else had been watching her before Dominic…

“Did your mommy know he was there?” I asked, keeping my voice as calm as possible so I wouldn’t frighten him.

“Yes,” Leo whispered, finally looking up at me with large, serious green eyes. “She told me not to go outside when the Shadow Man was there. But one time, he left something on the porch.”

“What did he leave?”

Leo shrugged his tiny shoulders. “A book. Mommy cried when she read it. Then she put it in the floor.”

“In the floor?”

“Under the rug by the fireplace.”

I stared at the drawing. Elena hadn’t just been hiding from Luca and Vanessa. Someone else had found her. Someone who left a book that made her weep, and that she felt the need to hide under the floorboards before she died.

That evening, after Luca had read Leo three bedtime stories and finally gotten the boy to sleep, I found him in his private study.

He was sitting in his leather chair, reviewing legitimate shipping contracts. The criminal empire was officially being dismantled, transitioned into clean, legal logistics companies.

“Luca,” I said, walking in and closing the heavy oak doors behind me.

He looked up, a warm smile instantly breaking across his handsome face. He put his pen down and held his hand out to me. “Come here.”

I walked over and let him pull me onto his lap. He buried his face in my neck, inhaling deeply.

“You smell like vanilla,” he murmured, kissing my jawline. “I could stay right here for the rest of my life.”

“I need to show you something,” I said softly, pulling away just enough to look into his dark eyes.

I reached into my pocket and unfolded Leo’s drawing.

I placed it on the desk over his contracts.

Luca frowned, looking at the crude black scribbles. “Leo drew this? Is that Dominic?”

“No,” I said. “Leo calls him the Shadow Man. He said this man watched the cabin before Dominic ever showed up. He said the man left a book on the porch, and Elena hid it under the floorboards near the fireplace.”

The warmth completely vanished from Luca’s face, replaced by a sharp, protective alertness.

“Someone else found her,” Luca realized, his jaw tightening. “Someone who knew she was there, but didn’t hurt her or report her to Vanessa.”

“We need to know what’s in that book, Luca. If someone else knows about Leo, if there’s a loose end from Vanessa’s family out there…”

Luca didn’t hesitate. He gently lifted me off his lap and stood up.

“I’ll call Marcus,” Luca said, grabbing his keys from the desk. “We’re flying back to West Virginia tonight.”

“I’m coming with you,” I insisted.

Four hours later, we were standing in the pitch-black, freezing living room of the abandoned mountain cabin.

Marcus held a heavy flashlight, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air.

Luca walked straight to the stone fireplace. He kicked aside the moldy, woven rug. He dropped to his knees and began tapping on the floorboards with the handle of his pocket knife.

Thud. Thud. Thud. Hollow.

Luca pried the blade of the knife into the seam of the wood and wrenched it upward. The old floorboard popped off with a loud squeak.

He reached into the dark cavity beneath the floor and pulled out a small, leather-bound journal.

It was wrapped tightly in plastic to protect it from the damp cold.

Luca tore the plastic away. He opened the journal.

The handwriting wasn’t Elena’s. It was jagged, masculine, and written in Italian.

Luca’s eyes scanned the first page. The flashlight beam trembled slightly in Marcus’s hand as he saw the look of absolute shock wash over his boss’s face.

“Boss?” Marcus asked quietly. “Whose journal is that?”

Luca looked up, his eyes wide, completely unmoored.

“It’s not a journal,” Luca whispered. “It’s a confession. Written by my father.”

TITLE: The Final Letter in the Journal

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