Chapter 2 - The Piano’s Warning
"She forced the pen into your mother’s thumb!" Vivien cried out, spinning around and pointing frantically toward the floor, where the legal documents and an open ink pad lay scattered among overturned chairs. "Look at her hand, Luca! She was stealing everything!"
On the floor, propped awkwardly against the base of the grand piano, Isabella Moretti struggled to breathe. Her pale blue cardigan was torn at the shoulder, and her gray hair was tumbling messily around her lined, aristocratic face. With agonizing slowness, Isabella lifted her left arm—her only functioning limb—and reached toward the polished mahogany keys of the piano.
Three low notes. Two high notes. Three low notes.
The danger code.
Naomi had heard that exact sequence during her five months in the Moretti household. It was Isabella’s silent, universal alarm, played whenever the front gates opened to unwelcome violence.
Luca’s dark eyes flicked from Vivien’s weeping face down to the scattered legal documents, and finally to his mother’s hand. He stepped past Vivien as if she were a ghost, his heavy boots clicking rhythmically against the hardwood floor.
He knelt beside his mother, ignoring the legal papers entirely. Gently, with a reverence that shocked even his closest security detail, Luca took his mother’s right hand in his own calloused palm. He looked at her thumb.
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It was stained dark with fresh black ink.
Then Luca looked at his mother's right arm. A stroke eight months prior had left that entire side of her body completely paralyzed, limp, and incapable of gripping anything—let alone a heavy legal pen or an ink pad.
