Chapter 3: What She Left Behind
The man stood in the doorway for three full seconds.
Then he said, "What did you just tell me?"
"He sent someone to find me." Bianca kept her voice steady.
"Before you walked in here, he was already making calls."
"You're bluffing."
"His name is Luca Moretti.
He's been with Adrian for eleven years." She watched the man's jaw tighten.
"You know that name.
I can see that you do."
He stepped back into the apartment.
The door swung almost closed behind him.
"How long has Moretti been looking?"
"Since I left the restaurant."
The man pulled out his phone.
He turned away from her and spoke quietly, too quietly for Bianca to catch the words.
His shoulders were rigid.
Whatever the person on the other end said, he didn't like it.
He ended the call and faced her.
"You have until six in the morning.
After that, I can't protect you."
"I didn't ask you to protect me."
"No." He looked around the apartment — the bare walls, the single lamp, the kitchen drawer still hanging open.
"You asked for nothing.
That's been your problem for fourteen years."
He left without closing the door.
Bianca stood in the silence for a moment.
Then she crossed to the door and turned both locks.
Her hands were steadier now than they had been all night.
She went back to the kitchen drawer and lifted the photograph again.
But this time she didn't look at the two teenagers beside the blue car.
She turned it over and pressed her thumbnail beneath the lower right corner of the backing paper.
It came away cleanly.
Behind it was a second photograph, smaller, folded once.
She opened it.
A man she didn't recognize stood outside a building she did.
The Vale Group's original headquarters, before the renovation.
The photograph was dated in pencil on the back.
The summer Adrian was eighteen.
Three weeks before the crash.
The man in the photograph was standing beside Richard Vale.
Adrian's father.
And he was handing Richard an envelope.
Bianca had found this photograph six months ago, tucked inside the lining of her mother's suitcase after the funeral.
Her mother had kept it for fourteen years and never once mentioned it.
She had kept it because she was afraid of it.
Bianca understood that now.
She also understood something else.
The man who had just left her apartment — the well-dressed man with the calm voice and the phone full of surveillance photos — was not in this picture.
Which meant he wasn't the one who had arranged the accident.
He was working for whoever was.
Bianca's phone buzzed on the counter.
An unknown number.
She answered.
Silence for two seconds.
Then a voice she had not heard in fourteen years.
"Don't leave the apartment."
Her breath stopped.
"Adrian."
"I know someone was just there." His voice was quiet and completely controlled.
"Are you hurt?"
"No."
"Don't open the door for anyone until Luca arrives.
He'll knock three times."
"How did you get this number?"
A pause.
"I've had it for six hours."
Bianca pressed her back against the wall.
"You knew where I was before tonight."
"I knew you were in the city.
I didn't know who you were." Another pause, shorter.
"I do now."
She closed her eyes.
"Adrian—"
"We'll talk when you're somewhere safe." His voice didn't change, but something underneath it did.
"Just stay where you are."
The call ended.
Bianca looked at the folded photograph in her hand.
The man handing the envelope to Richard Vale.
She still didn't know his name.
But Adrian had resources she had never had.
Investigators.
Records.
Access to things that had been buried for decades.
Three knocks landed on the door.
She crossed the room and opened it.
Luca Moretti was not what she had expected.
He was younger than she'd imagined, dark-eyed, with the kind of stillness that came from years of watching rooms instead of talking in them.
He looked at her the way someone looks at a person they've been briefed on but haven't fully believed in yet.
"Bianca Vale," he said.
"Yes."
He glanced past her into the apartment.
"You need to bring whatever matters.
We're not coming back here."
She turned and picked up the two photographs from the counter.
That was all she took.
Luca held the door.
As she stepped into the hallway, he said quietly, "He hasn't slept.
Just so you know."
Bianca didn't answer.
But she held the photographs a little tighter.
Outside, a black car waited at the curb with its engine running.
The city was still dark.
Rain had started again, soft and steady, the same kind of rain that had been falling on a mountain road fourteen years ago.
Bianca got into the car.
The door closed.
And somewhere across the city, in a building whose address she didn't yet know, her brother was waiting to remember everything he had lost.
She didn't know what she was more afraid of.
That he wouldn't believe her.
Or that he would — and that whoever had sent that well-dressed man to her apartment would find out before morning.
Her phone buzzed again.
Different number this time.
A text message.
May you like
Four words.
*We know you moved.*
