Chapter 3 - The Secret in the SafeThe dinner table could have seated twelve, but only Dante, Claire, and the three boys sat around it. The silence was heavy, punctuated only by the clink of silver against bone china.
Dante didn't look at his sons once during the meal, but Claire noticed how his peripheral vision never left them. He watched their hands, their micro-expressions, the way Matteo flinched when a servant cleared a plate too loudly.
They're trained, Claire realized with a chill. Not just raised. Guarded.
Later that night, after the boys were finally asleep—having exhausted themselves trying to trick Claire into a pillow fight that she decisively won—Claire went down to the kitchen to fetch a glass of water.
The house was dead silent. The kind of silence that belonged to a fortress.
As she passed Dante’s ground-floor study, she noticed a sliver of warm light spilling across the dark hardwood floor. The heavy oak door was ajar.
She should have walked away. She had a daughter to protect, a job to keep, and a life that was finally climbing out of the red. But curiosity—or perhaps the journalist instinct she’d abandoned years ago—drew her forward.
She pushed the door open an inch.
Dante wasn't at his desk. He was standing in front of an open wall safe behind a mahogany bookshelf. Inside the safe weren't stacks of cash or illegal ledgers.
It was a box of old photographs and a stack of medical files.
Dante pulled out a photo and stared at it under the desk lamp. His shoulders were rigid, his posture bearing the weight of a ghost. Claire squinted through the crack, trying to see the image.
It was a woman with dark hair and a bright, fierce smile, holding a newborn baby. Standing beside her was a younger Dante, looking proud and unbroken.
Across the bottom of the photo, written in sharp red ink, were the words: They won't stop until we're all gone.
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Suddenly, a cold metal barrel pressed gently against the soft skin of Claire’s neck.
"Curiosity, Ms. Beaumont," a voice whispered right beside her ear, cold as an executioner's blade, "is a terminal disease in this house."
