Chapter 4 - The Dead WomanFor one impossible second, my mind refused to accept what my eyes were seeing.
The woman standing behind the chapel statue had the same dark hair as the portrait above the grand staircase. The same fine bones. The same mouth. The same haunted eyes that followed you from gold frames no matter where you stood in the Rossi mansion.
Isabella Rossi.
Lorenzo’s wife.
Leo’s mother.
Dead, according to everyone.
Buried, according to Lorenzo himself.
Yet she stood before me in a gray nightdress, one hand braced against the hidden doorway, candle flame shaking in the other.
“Give me my son,” she said again.
The chapel door slammed behind us.
Matteo made a sound like a trapped bird.
I clutched Leo tighter and backed away from both entrances. My head spun. Dead women did not walk out of walls. Grief could make you see things, but Matteo saw her too. His face had gone blank with shock.
“Mrs. Rossi?” he whispered.
The woman’s eyes flicked to him. Recognition cut through her exhaustion. “Matteo.”
The door boomed again.
The man outside cursed.
Isabella stepped fully into the chapel. She was too thin, her wrists sharp, her face hollow. There were bruises around one arm, old yellow shadows fading beneath newer blue marks. Her hair had been cut unevenly, as if someone had taken scissors to it in anger.
She looked alive.
Barely.
“Please,” she said to me. “I know what they told you. I know what everyone thinks. But he’s mine.”
Leo turned at the sound of her voice.
A tiny movement.
A mother’s name written in his body.
My grip loosened before my fear agreed.
Then the chapel door cracked.
The bolt would not hold much longer.
Isabella crossed the room with surprising speed. “This way.”
I did not move.
She looked at me, and in her eyes I saw the one thing no performance could fake.
A mother losing time.
“You fed him,” she whispered. “Didn’t you?”
Tears sprang to my eyes.
“Yes.”
Her face broke.
Not loudly. Not theatrically. It broke inward, the way mine had in the hospital when the nurse said, “I’m so sorry,” and the world ended without making a sound.
“Thank you,” Isabella said.
The door splintered.
That decided it.
I grabbed Matteo with my free hand and followed Isabella through the hidden opening behind the statue. The passage beyond was lower than the first, forcing us to crouch. Isabella moved with painful familiarity, one palm against the wall.
“Where are we going?” I whispered.
“Under the greenhouse.”
“You’re supposed to be dead.”
“I was supposed to stay useful.”
The words chilled me.
Behind us, the chapel door finally broke open.
Men entered shouting.
Isabella pulled a lever disguised as a loose stone. The panel behind us sealed shut, leaving us in blackness.
Matteo whimpered.
Isabella blew out the candle.
No light now.
Only breathing.
Leo’s.
Mine.
Matteo’s.
Hers.
Boots entered the chapel behind the wall.
A man said, “Where did they go?”
Another answered, “Find the panel.”
Then Serafina’s voice.
“Careful. My sister-in-law knows the old bones of this house better than Lorenzo ever did.”
Isabella stiffened beside me.
Sister-in-law.
Not ghost.
Not hallucination.
Captive.
Serafina knew she was alive.
“She kept you hidden,” I whispered.
Isabella’s lips nearly touched my ear. “She kept me erased.”
The men in the chapel searched for the panel, but Isabella had chosen well. Their footsteps moved away after several tense minutes.
Only when silence returned did she guide us deeper.
The tunnel sloped downward, then curved. At last, dim green light appeared ahead. We emerged into a storage room beneath the greenhouse. Glass panes above us caught moonlight and turned the space into a fractured dream. Empty clay pots lined the walls. Dead vines hung from hooks.
Isabella took Leo from me.
I let her.
The instant he reached her arms, she pressed her face to his head and shook silently. Leo stirred, confused and weak, then made a tiny broken sound that was almost recognition.
“My baby,” she breathed. “My sweet boy. My Leo.”
Watching them opened something inside me I had tried to nail shut.
I turned away too late.
A sob escaped.
Isabella heard it.
When she looked at me, she looked not like a rich man’s wife, not like a portrait, not like a ghost.
She looked like a woman who understood exactly what had been taken from me.
“You lost a child,” she said.
I nodded.
“Girl?”
My throat closed.
“Lily.”
Isabella closed her eyes.
“I’m sorry.”
Those two words, spoken by someone holding the child I had just saved with the milk meant for my daughter, nearly took my knees out from under me.
Matteo sat on an overturned crate, holding his injured arm.
“We need Mr. Rossi,” he said.
Isabella’s face changed.
“Lorenzo thinks you’re dead,” I said.
“He thinks he buried me.”
“How?”
She looked toward the greenhouse door above us. “There was a body. Burned in the east car accident. Jewelry. Dental records arranged by a doctor who owed Serafina more money than he owed God.”
“Dr. Bellini?”
“No. He came later. Bellini keeps Leo weak. Dr. Anselmo helped bury me alive.”
The words made my stomach twist.
“Why didn’t you escape?”
Isabella laughed once. It sounded like glass cracking.
“I tried. The first time, they showed me footage of Lorenzo holding Leo at my funeral. Serafina told me if I came back, Lorenzo would die in a war before sunrise. The second time, she put Leo’s blanket under my door with blood on it. Not his, I think. But I believed her.” Her arms tightened around the baby. “After that, I waited. I listened. I learned which guards were hers and which were still his. Then I heard you in the nursery tonight.”
“How?”
“There are vents. This house carries sound when it wants to.”
Above us, a door opened.
All four of us froze.
Voices drifted into the greenhouse.
Serafina’s.
And another man’s.
Darren’s.
My ex-boyfriend.
I knew his voice before I understood it. The careless drag. The fake confidence. The anger always waiting underneath.
“You said she’d be alone,” Darren snapped. “You said I could take her after this.”
My blood turned to ice.
Serafina answered calmly. “You will get your money when I get the child.”
“I don’t care about your nephew. I want Mara.”
Leo stirred in Isabella’s arms.
My scarred body remembered the staircase.
The shove.
The fall.
The silence after Lily was born.
Isabella looked at me, and her eyes sharpened with fury.
“That man hurt you?”
I could not speak.
Darren continued above us. “She owes me. If she hadn’t run her mouth to those collectors, none of this would’ve happened.”
Serafina’s heels clicked slowly across the greenhouse floor.
“You threw a pregnant woman down stairs,” she said, almost bored. “Do not dress yourself in injustice now.”
He lowered his voice. “You promised me protection.”
“And I promised you payment,” Serafina said. “Protection depends on obedience.”
A phone buzzed.
Serafina answered.
For the first time, her calm cracked.
“What do you mean Lorenzo is gone?”
My heart stopped.
Gone.
Not captured.
Not dead.
Gone.
Serafina’s voice sharpened. “Find him before he reaches the west garage.”
Isabella looked at me.
Hope moved between us like a dangerous flame.
Lorenzo was alive.
And he was free.
Then Darren spoke again, closer to the greenhouse stairs.
“Forget Rossi. I know where Mara would hide.”
I backed away instinctively.
The floorboard above us creaked.
Darren laughed.
“She always did run downward when she was scared.”
May you like
His shadow crossed the trapdoor.
And then he started lifting it.
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