Chapter 3 - The Ghost of the Past
Matteo didn't move. His breath caught in his throat, a sharp, suffocating pain tearing open the scar tissue around his heart. For a horrifying, beautiful second, he thought his mind had finally snapped. He thought Aurora had come back.
He turned sharply and descended the grand staircase two steps at a time, his dark coat billowing behind him like the wings of an angry crow.
Down in the foyer, little Luna had stopped singing. She stood before a large, carved oak door that remained perpetually locked—the door to Aurora's bedroom. She was holding a small, yellow dandelion she had somehow smuggled in from the garden, reaching up on her tiptoes to press it against the dark wood.
"Hey!" Matteo’s voice cracked through the corridor, raw, trembling, and terrifying.
Luna spun around. She didn't cry. Instead, her big, round hazel eyes looked up at the towering, stern man in the black three-piece suit. She saw the cold gray eyes, the pale, tight jaw, but she also saw the profound, bottomless sorrow hiding just beneath the surface.
Matteo stopped three feet away from her. His chest heaved. He looked down at the child—the messy brown curls, the oversized yellow sweater, the smudged red sneakers. She looked nothing like Aurora, yet she felt like an earthquake hitting the epicenter of his well-guarded grief.
"Who let you in here?" Matteo demanded, his voice dropping to a gravelly whisper, though the fury he expected to feel was entirely absent, replaced by a strange, hollow terror.
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Luna didn't answer with words. She stepped forward, ignoring the terrifying aura of the mafia boss, walked right up to his polished leather shoes, and held up the crushed yellow dandelion.
"For you," she whispered, her voice innocent and clear. "The house is too sad. You need a flower."
