Chapter 2 - THE BLACK SEAL
Isabella tried to sit up, but dizziness drove her back against the pillows. Luca did not reach for her. He remained beside the fire with both hands visible, giving her the distance she needed.
“You’re Luca Duca,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Damian’s enemy.”
“That depends on which crime, contract, or funeral we’re discussing.”
Her gaze moved toward the locked door. Luca understood the fear before she voiced it. “Damian does not know you’re here,” he told her. “Only my physician, my security chief, and a handful of people I trust have seen you.”
“You trust them?”
“I trusted them yesterday.”
The answer did not reassure her, but it was honest. Dr. Hail entered, checked her temperature and neurological responses, then warned Luca that stress could worsen her condition. Isabella waited until the physician finished before asking for the envelope. Luca passed it to her without trying to examine the seal.
She held it against her chest. “My mother left me thirty-eight percent of Carter Freight. Dad controls the rest, but my shares can block a sale. Damian told me the marriage would protect the company from creditors. Yesterday morning, his attorney gave me what he called a marital asset agreement. I signed because my father said eight hundred employees would lose their jobs if I refused.”
“What did it actually authorize?”
“I didn’t know until I heard them inside the sacristy.”
Isabella described arriving early at St. Augustine’s, which had been closed for winter restoration but privately prepared for the ceremony. Her bridesmaids were sent to the reception hotel after Damian claimed the heating system had failed. When Isabella went looking for her father, she heard Richard and Damian speaking behind the sacristy door.
Richard had said, “The proxy is active. Her votes belong to you now.”
Damian answered, “Then by sunrise she can be a runaway no one finds.”
Isabella entered before fear could stop her. On the table between the men lay the black envelope. Damian’s expression changed when he saw her looking at it. He told Richard to leave, then tried to convince Isabella she had misunderstood. When she reached for his phone, Damian caught her wrist hard enough to bruise it.
“I grabbed the envelope because it was the only thing he tried to protect,” she said. “I knocked over a candle stand and ran through the side door. One of his men caught my veil. I lost my shoe kicking free.”
She made it as far as the iron gate before Damian reached her. He tore away her coat, shoved her against the stone, and demanded the envelope. Isabella hid it beneath her dress and told him she had thrown it inside the chapel. Before his men could search her properly, headlights appeared on the road. Damian apparently believed the approaching vehicles belonged to a county patrol.
“He said the snow would make this simple,” Isabella whispered. “Then he left. I crawled behind the wall because I thought they would come back.”
Luca looked toward the envelope. His convoy had taken the chapel road only because an overturned truck blocked the highway. Ten minutes later and Damian’s men might have returned. Ten minutes earlier and Luca might have driven directly into them.
Isabella broke the seal herself while Marco recorded the process for evidence continuity. Inside they found a brass safe-deposit key marked 317, a microSD card taped beneath a folded strip of accounting paper, and six handwritten entries. One line froze Luca’s attention:
M.D. — HARBOR 14 — V.D. ACCESS — $2,000,000.
Matteo Duca had died three years earlier in a warehouse fire at Harbor 14. Damian denied involvement, and the city’s fire investigator ruled the explosion accidental. Luca had never believed it.
Before he could examine the remaining entries, his private phone vibrated. A photograph filled the screen. Isabella was asleep beneath the east-wing blankets, the image captured from the security camera above the bedroom door.
A message appeared beneath it.
RETURN MY BRIDE. RETURN THE BLACK ENVELOPE.
Marco went pale. Luca’s security system was isolated from the public internet. Only three people possessed permanent master access: Luca, Marco, and Luca’s uncle Vittorio Duca.
Isabella read the message over Luca’s arm. “You said Damian didn’t know.”
“He shouldn’t.”
“What are you going to do?”
Luca looked at the initials beside his dead brother’s name. The man he had been for most of his adult life already knew the answer: seal the estate, find the leak, and make people disappear until somebody confessed.
Isabella saw it in his face. “If you kill whoever sent that, Damian loses a witness and you become exactly what he expects. I didn’t survive that chapel so two families could start shooting each other over me.”
“This is not because of you.”
“It will be if you use me as the excuse.”
Luca’s eyes settled on her. She was weak, frightened, and surrounded by men whose names appeared in police files, yet she refused to surrender control of what happened next.
“There’s a federal prosecutor,” Isabella continued. “Naomi Reyes. She investigated Carter Freight last year. My father called her a parasite, which probably means she couldn’t be bought. Call her.”
Bringing a federal prosecutor into his estate could destroy Luca’s organization as efficiently as it destroyed Damian’s. Isabella understood that. She also understood that refusing would reveal what kind of protection Luca was truly offering.
He picked up the phone. “Marco, find Reyes.”
May you like
Isabella loosened her grip on the envelope for the first time since the chapel.
Across Chicago, Damian Russo watched the east-wing camera feed vanish. Someone inside Luca’s security network had failed to deliver the key, and failure was something Damian punished quickly.
