Chapter 5 - The Watch That Never Worked
Luca pulled Elena behind him.
The closet door opened.
Sofia stepped out.
Elena stared.
“What are you doing here?”
Sofia looked exhausted.
“Saving both of you.”
Luca’s expression hardened.
“Marco was guarding you.”
“Marco was guarding the room I was supposed to be in.”
“You escaped?”
“I’ve been escaping rooms controlled by Valenti men since before you were born.”
Under different circumstances, Luca might have admired the answer.
Not tonight.
“The box is gone,” Elena said.
“I know.”
“You took it?”
“No.”
“Then who?”
Sofia looked toward the window.
“Cecilia.”
“That’s impossible,” Luca said. “She was at the depot.”
“She wasn’t working alone.”
“Enzo?”
“No.”
Sofia walked toward the photograph Elena held.
“Cecilia has spent twenty years making everyone believe there are only two sides. Valenti and Moretti. There was always a third.”
“Who?”
“People who made money from both.”
Luca thought about the ledger.
Politicians.
Police.
Attorneys.
Executives.
A network without a single surname.
Sofia continued.
“Your father eventually understood that. Isabella understood first.”
Elena sat on the edge of her bed.
“My father?”
“Carlo understood too.”
“Then why didn’t they expose it?”
“They tried.”
Sofia looked at Luca.
“Every time they prepared evidence, someone disappeared.”
“Adriana.”
“Yes.”
“Others?”
“Many.”
Luca’s jaw tightened.
“And you stayed silent.”
“I kept you alive.”
“You keep saying that as if it absolves you.”
“It doesn’t.”
Sofia’s answer was immediate.
“I was a coward.”
Luca had never heard her describe herself that way.
She sat across from Elena.
“The night Isabella died, she called me.”
Luca looked at her.
“You never told me.”
“No.”
“What did she say?”
“She told me to get you out of the house.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I tried.”
Sofia’s voice broke.
“Vittorio stopped me.”
Luca remembered his father that night.
Standing at the bottom of the staircase.
Blood on one cuff.
Not his own.
Luca had buried the image for years.
“What happened?”
“Your father believed Isabella had betrayed him. He didn’t understand she was trying to save him too.”
“Save him from what?”
“From becoming the thing everyone already believed he was.”
Silence settled.
Elena looked at Sofia.
“Why come here?”
“Because I remembered Carlo’s watch.”
“You knew?”
“I knew it mattered. I didn’t know why.”
“The box is gone.”
“But the watch isn’t.”
Elena stared.
“What?”
Sofia pointed toward the photograph.
“Your father never kept important things where people expected.”
Elena looked down.
Carlo was wearing the watch in the photograph.
Behind him stood an old wooden clock.
She recognized it.
Her father’s study clock.
She still owned it.
It was downstairs in the storage room.
They found it wrapped in a blanket.
Inside the back panel was Carlo’s watch.
Elena laughed once through tears.
“He put a worthless watch inside a broken clock.”
Luca examined it.
The crown unscrewed.
Inside was a tiny brass key.
Not digital.
Not sophisticated.
Old-fashioned.
Carlo had understood something Luca’s generation often forgot.
Technology could be hacked.
A key could only be stolen.
Engraved along its shaft were four numbers.
Elena knew the date.
“April seventeenth.”
“What happened then?” Luca asked.
“My mother died.”
Luca looked at her.
Elena rarely spoke about her mother.
Anna Russo had died when Elena was six.
Illness, according to everything Elena knew.
Sofia looked disturbed.
“Anna died on April seventeenth?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
Sofia stood.
“Anna was supposed to meet Isabella that day.”
Elena stared.
“My mother knew her?”
“They were friends.”
“No.”
“Elena—”
“My father never told me.”
“He was protecting you.”
Elena laughed bitterly.
“Apparently every lie in my childhood was protection.”
Luca understood that feeling too well.
The key led them to a private deposit box Carlo had maintained under an old company name.
Inside were three cassette tapes, documents, and a sealed letter addressed jointly:
TO ELENA RUSSO AND LUCA VALENTI.
They read it together.
Carlo explained everything he could.
Anna Russo had been the accountant who first noticed unexplained transfers linking Valenti companies to shell corporations controlled by supposedly hostile families.
She showed Carlo.
Carlo approached Isabella.
The three began collecting evidence.
Anna died before they could finish.
Her illness had been real.
Her death had not been part of the conspiracy.
That truth gave Elena a strange, painful relief.
Not every tragedy had been engineered.
Some losses were simply losses.
But Carlo continued the work.
So did Isabella.
Then Isabella died.
Carlo knew he would be next.
He divided the evidence.
The ledger contained transactions.
The tapes contained voices.
And the final document contained the identities of the people who had kept the network alive.
Elena unfolded it.
The first name was Cecilia Bellandi.
The second was Enzo’s father, Roberto Valenti.
The third was Police Commissioner Daniel Ferretti.
There were seven more.
Several were still alive.
Luca read each one.
Then he reached the final paragraph.
Vittorio Valenti was guilty of many things. But he did not order Isabella’s death. After her death, he spent the rest of his life secretly dismantling the network he once tolerated. That is why he was killed.
Luca sat down.
“My father was killed?”
His father’s official cause of death had been heart failure.
Carlo’s letter said otherwise.
Poison.
Slow enough to resemble illness.
Sofia cried quietly.
“I suspected.”
“You knew?”
“I suspected.”
“That’s not the same.”
“No.”
For the first time, Luca saw his father not as monster or martyr, but as something more difficult.
A flawed man who had made terrible choices.
A man whose fear had helped cause Carlo’s death.
A man who later tried to undo the machine he had helped empower.
Redemption did not erase guilt.
But guilt did not erase every attempt at redemption either.
Elena placed the letter down.
“We have names.”
“We need evidence strong enough to survive people with influence.”
“The tapes.”
They played the first.
Cecilia’s voice.
Clear.
Discussing payments.
The second contained Roberto Valenti.
The third began with Vittorio.
Luca almost stopped it.
Elena touched his arm.
He let it play.
Vittorio’s voice sounded older than Luca remembered.
“If anything happens to Isabella, every agreement ends.”
Another man laughed.
“You’re sentimental.”
“No. I’m warning you.”
“You benefited from us.”
“I did.”
“And now?”
“Now I know what it cost.”
The recording continued.
Then a woman spoke.
Cecilia.
“You cannot leave.”
Vittorio answered.
“Watch me.”
The tape ended.
Luca looked at Elena.
“We can destroy them with this.”
“No.”
He frowned.
“No?”
“If you use your people, this becomes another Valenti war.”
“What do you suggest?”
“We make it impossible to bury.”
She pointed at the documents.
“Attorneys. Federal investigators. Journalists. Multiple copies. Everything released simultaneously.”
Sofia nodded.
“Carlo wanted sunlight.”
Luca looked at Elena.
His instinct had always been to control.
Her plan required surrendering control.
Perhaps that was precisely why it could work.
“Do it.”
For the next six hours they copied everything.
Marco returned after discovering Sofia’s escape and received a very short explanation.
He was not pleased.
But he helped.
Matteo was released after admitting his role.
Enzo remained detained.
Cecilia had disappeared.
By sunrise, packages were prepared.
Elena selected recipients outside the network.
Luca selected attorneys with enough independence to protect the evidence.
Sofia added names Isabella had trusted.
They were nearly finished when Elena’s phone rang.
Unknown number.
She answered.
Cecilia’s voice.
“You found Carlo’s archive.”
Elena looked at Luca.
“Yes.”
“Then you understand.”
“I understand you lied to me for fourteen years.”
“I kept you alive.”
“There it is again.”
Cecilia sighed.
“You think Luca can protect you?”
Elena looked at him.
“I think I can protect myself.”
A pause.
Then Cecilia said, “Ask Luca where Enzo is.”
Luca turned toward Marco.
Marco immediately called the estate.
No answer from the guard.
Then another call.
His face changed.
“Enzo’s gone.”
Cecilia laughed softly through Elena’s phone.
“He took something with him.”
“What?”
“The one person who can prove who tampered with Isabella’s car.”
Luca froze.
“Who?”
Cecilia answered.
“Adriana Serra.”
Matteo’s mother.
Alive.
Elena looked at Matteo.
All color left his face.
“My mother is dead.”
Cecilia’s voice came through the phone.
“No, Matteo.”
A door opened somewhere on Cecilia’s end of the call.
A woman screamed.
Matteo lunged toward the phone.
“Mom?”
The line went silent.
Then a message arrived.
A photograph.
An older woman sat in a chair.
Alive.
May you like
Terrified.
And behind her stood Enzo.
