Chapter 9 - Ashes
By the time we reached Lumina, flames were pushing through the upper windows.
Firefighters blocked the street.
Guests and employees crowded behind barricades.
The golden building where I had spent eleven months being invisible was burning from the inside out.
Alessandro told me to stay in the SUV.
I lasted forty seconds.
I got out.
Enzo swore.
“Mara.”
“Chloe.”
“She’s at the clinic.”
“Julian?”
Nobody answered.
I crossed toward the employee crowd.
One dishwasher recognized me.
“Mara.”
His face was streaked with soot.
“What happened?”
“Kitchen explosion.”
Then he shook his head.
“No.”
“That’s what they’re saying.”
“But the fire started downstairs.”
“In the records room.”
The records room.
Employee files.
Schedules.
Security backups.
Everything that could explain why I had been hired.
I turned.
Alessandro stood behind me.
He had heard.
A fire captain approached him.
“Mr. Vitale.”
That alone told me who officially owned Lumina.
Alessandro.
Of course.
The captain lowered his voice.
“Accelerant was found near the basement archive.”
“Cameras?”
“System went down four minutes before ignition.”
Alessandro’s face became stone.
“Bodies?”
“None so far.”
“Julian Mercer?”
“Unaccounted for.”
We walked toward the alley behind the restaurant.
Rain hissed against blackened brick.
Something crunched beneath my shoe.
I bent carefully.
A small piece of green stone lay in the gutter.
My breath caught.
It was glass.
Not emerald.
But beside it lay something else.
A silver button.
I knew that button.
Julian’s vest.
I pointed.
Enzo put on gloves and collected it.
Then I noticed a mark scratched into the brick.
A bird.
Tiny.
Wings spread.
The same bird engraved inside my grandmother’s ring.
“Alessandro.”
He followed my gaze.
His expression changed.
“That symbol belongs to my mother’s family.”
“Why would it be here?”
“I do not know.”
A voice came from behind us.
“Because someone wanted her to see it.”
We turned.
Chloe stood beneath an umbrella held by a clinic driver.
Her face was pale.
There was bruising around one wrist.
I ran toward her.
“What are you doing here?”
“I remembered something.”
She looked at Alessandro.
“When they took me, I was drugged.”
“But I heard them arguing.”
“About what?”
“A woman.”
My skin prickled.
“What woman?”
“They kept saying she had made a mistake twenty-eight years ago.”
“They said she should have killed both boys.”
Alessandro went still.
Chloe swallowed.
“And then one of them said something else.”
“What?”
“He said Sofia Hale died without telling anyone where she hid the second child.”
The world seemed to tilt.
I stared at her.
“Second child?”
Chloe nodded.
Alessandro’s face had gone completely blank.
Then the burning roof of Lumina collapsed behind us.
Sparks erupted into the night.
May you like
And in their light, Alessandro whispered the name he had not spoken in years.
“Matteo.”
