Chapter 3: What the Brother Already Knew
Luca did not sleep that night.
He sat in the study until the lake outside went from black to grey to the flat, colorless white of early morning.
The financial records were still open on his laptop.
Nineteen transfers across twelve years.
The amounts were never large enough to trigger his accountants' attention.
That was the point.
Marco had understood, from the beginning, that patience was the only tool a man needed when the person he was stealing from could not stand up to stop him.
Luca closed the laptop.
He picked up his phone and called Ren, his head of security, again.
"Where is he now?"
"Home.
His apartment on the Gold Coast.
He got back around eleven."
"Was he alone when he left the estate yesterday?"
A pause.
"He walked out with the girl.
Maya.
They were talking.
He had his hand on her shoulder."
Luca set the phone down on the desk without ending the call.
He looked at the wall.
Then he picked it back up.
"Pull every camera on the estate from yesterday afternoon.
Every angle that covers the south garden, the porch, and the path from the staff entrance.
Send it to my laptop."
"Yes, sir."
"And Ren.
Nobody tells Marco anything.
Nobody tells him I've been looking at the records.
Nobody tells him about the tests."
"Understood."
He ended the call.
The footage arrived in twelve minutes.
He found the relevant timestamp and watched Marco cross the south lawn with the easy stride of a man who had spent years walking through a property he considered, in all the ways that mattered, his own.
He stopped near the baseball diamond.
Maya was on the diamond, throwing a ball at the backstop.
She turned when she heard him.
Luca turned up the audio.
"Your name's Maya, right?" Marco's voice was warm.
Practiced.
"Yes," Maya said.
"I'm Luca's brother.
Marco." He crouched down to her level.
"He talks about you."
"He does?"
"He does." Marco smiled.
"Your mom works here.
Elena, right?"
Maya nodded.
"Your mom's a good woman," Marco said.
"You know, I knew someone named Elena a long time ago.
Different woman.
But same name." He tilted his head.
"You look a little like her, actually.
Funny how that works."
Maya looked at him with the same direct assessment she turned on everything.
"I look like my mom," she said.
"Of course you do." Marco stood.
He ruffled her hair lightly.
"Of course."
He walked back toward the house.
He did not look at the cameras.
He did not need to.
He had already gotten what he came for.
Luca watched the footage twice more.
Then he closed the laptop and sat very still.
Marco had not come to welcome the new housekeeper.
He had come to see if the child looked like anyone he recognized.
And from the expression on his face as he walked away — the small, controlled tightening around the mouth, the way his hands went into his pockets — Luca understood that Marco had found his answer.
Marco knew about Maya.
Which meant Marco knew that Luca now had a reason to fight back that he had not had before.
Luca picked up his phone a third time.
Not to call Ren.
He called his attorney, Daniel Marsh, and when Marsh answered on the second ring with the alert tone of a man who had learned that late calls from Luca Costello were rarely routine, Luca said:
"I need you to pull the original estate trust documents.
The ones from before my father d*ed.
The inheritance structure.
Everything."
A silence.
"Luca, it's four in the morning."
"I know what time it is."
Another silence.
Then: "I'll have them on your desk by eight."
"Six," Luca said.
"And Daniel.
Don't log this request through the main office system."
The pause that followed was longer.
"How bad is it?" Marsh said.
Luca looked at the closed laptop.
At the nineteen transfers.
At the footage he had already memorized.
"I don't know yet," he said.
"But I think my brother has been planning this for longer than twelve years."
He ended the call.
Outside, the lake had gone from grey to pale gold.
Somewhere on the other side of the hedge, in the small staff cottage, Elena Harper was probably making coffee.
Maya was probably still asleep, her coat hung on the back of a chair, her shoes with the separating sole set neatly by the door.
Marco had put his hand on her shoulder.
Luca felt something settle in his chest that was not quite anger and not quite grief.
It was colder than either.
It was the specific clarity of a man who has just understood the full shape of the problem and is beginning, for the first time in twelve years, to calculate the solution.
He wheeled to the window and watched the light come up over the water.
He had a daughter.
He had a brother who already knew it.
May you like
And somewhere in the estate's history was the reason Marco had needed him in that wheelchair badly enough to p0ison him for six months.
He intended to find all of it.
