Chapter 8 - A Grave With the Wrong Name
Father Michael lowered the weapon.
“If I wanted you dead, Dominic, you wouldn’t have heard the bell.”
Tommy wanted to shoot him anyway.
Dominic stopped him.
Michael had baptized both Castellano brothers.
He had buried Isabella.
Then Enzo.
He had been family.
“Are you the Kingmaker?” Dominic asked.
Michael almost smiled.
“No.”
“Prove it.”
“I can’t.”
“Bad answer.”
“I can tell you who is.”
“Then do it.”
Michael looked at Clara.
“Not until Evelyn arrives.”
Clara’s heart stopped.
“She’s alive?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Coming here.”
Clara slapped him.
Hard.
“You knew?”
Michael accepted it.
“I helped fake her death.”
“Why?”
“To keep you alive.”
Clara’s eyes filled.
“You let me bury an empty coffin.”
“Yes.”
“You let me grieve her for thirteen years.”
“Yes.”
Dominic stepped between them before Clara struck him again.
Michael explained.
After Enzo’s murder, Evelyn learned the Kingmaker had discovered Clara’s identity.
Her death was staged.
Clara was left outside the conspiracy deliberately.
Until she chose forensic accounting.
Then accepted a contract with Castellano Holdings.
“You walked back into the same war,” Michael said.
Clara laughed bitterly.
“Apparently genetics.”
A car approached.
A woman stepped out.
Older.
Gray threaded through her dark hair.
Clara knew her immediately.
Evelyn.
Mother and daughter stared across twenty feet of cemetery grass.
Clara did not run to her.
Evelyn did not ask her to.
“I’m sorry,” Evelyn said.
Clara’s voice shook.
“You don’t get thirteen years back with two words.”
“I know.”
“You were alive.”
“Yes.”
“You watched me?”
“Every day I safely could.”
Clara cried then.
Not gently.
All the grief she had carried cracked open.
Evelyn finally approached.
Clara let her mother hold her for three seconds.
Then pushed away.
“Who is the Kingmaker?”
Evelyn looked at Dominic.
“Someone your father trusted more than Salvatore.”
“Name.”
“I need the ledger first.”
“No more trades.”
“If I say his name without proof, he disappears.”
Dominic understood.
“You know where the final ledger is.”
Evelyn nodded.
“So does Salvatore.”
“Where?”
Evelyn looked toward Enzo’s distant grave.
“Your father was buried with it.”
They exhumed Enzo that afternoon.
Inside his coffin they found no ledger.
Only an envelope.
Dominic opened it.
A single sentence:
IF YOU OPENED THIS GRAVE, HE ALREADY KNOWS.
Then Clara’s phone rang.
Unknown number.
She answered.
Salvatore spoke.
“Bring Evelyn to the Aster.”
Clara looked at her mother.
“Why?”
“Because after nineteen years, I think it’s time she meets the man she helped create.”
A gunshot cracked through the cemetery.
Father Michael fell.
Everyone dropped.
Dominic turned toward the tree line.
A sniper vanished between the graves.
Michael was alive.
Shot through the shoulder.
But when Clara looked back, Evelyn was gone.
Her mother had disappeared.
May you like
On the grass where she had stood lay the final ledger.
And it was open to Dominic Castellano’s name.
