Chapter 15 - The Boy in the Photograph
The investigation widened.
Whitfield talked first.
Clara documented better.
Rinaldi denied everything.
That left the passports.
Among the goods found in the lower stable were twenty-three passports, some real, some altered, some belonging to people Dominic’s security team could not identify. He turned them over through attorneys to the proper authorities, but one photograph stayed in his mind.
A boy of about nine.
Dark hair. Serious eyes. A faint scar near his eyebrow.
The name on the passport was false.
But Dominic knew the scar.
He had given it to his younger brother, Matteo, when they were children fighting over a wooden boat in the bathtub. Matteo had slipped, hit the sink, and bled dramatically enough that their mother cried and their father called them idiots.
Matteo vanished sixteen years ago.
Everyone assumed he was dead.
Dominic had buried the assumption because hope was a kind of debt he could not afford.
Now he sat in his office staring at a passport photo that looked like Matteo’s son.
Enzo stood across from him.
“You’re sure?”
“No.”
But his voice said otherwise.
The passport was recent. The boy could not be Matteo. Too young. But he could be blood.
“Rinaldi had this?”
“In a lockbox with documents tied to old routes.”
Dominic rubbed a hand over his face.
“Find where it came from.”
“We’re already looking.”
“No mistakes.”
Enzo hesitated.
“There’s more.”
Dominic looked up.
“The boy’s document links to a woman named Elena Marquez. She entered the country under protection eight years ago, then disappeared from records. Last known address was in Newark.”
Dominic’s heart moved in a way he did not permit.
“Elena was Matteo’s fiancée.”
Enzo went quiet.
Dominic stood.
Old grief opened like a door in a storm.
He remembered Matteo laughing too loudly, borrowing his jackets, refusing to lower his voice even when dangerous men entered rooms. Matteo had wanted out. A restaurant. A normal life. A wife. Children. Sundays without bodyguards.
Then he disappeared during a territorial dispute everyone blamed on the Moretti crew.
Dominic had spent years punishing the wrong ghosts.
“Why would Rinaldi have a passport tied to Elena?” Enzo asked.
Dominic looked at the photograph.
“Leverage.”
That evening, Sofia found him in the winter garden.
She had come looking for Mia’s sweater and found Dominic standing alone beneath orange trees, holding the passport copy.
“You look like someone died,” she said softly.
He almost said they did.
Instead, he handed her the photograph.
She looked at it.
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you think you should.”
Dominic looked away.
“My brother disappeared sixteen years ago. This boy may be connected to him.”
Sofia’s face softened.
“You had a brother?”
“Yes.”
“What was his name?”
“Matteo.”
“Were you close?”
Dominic gave a humorless breath.
“As close as two boys could be in a house that raised sons like weapons.”
Sofia looked again at the photo.
“Then find him.”
“It may be a trap.”
“Most things are.”
He looked at her.
She shrugged faintly.
“I’m a maid in a mafia mansion. My standards for normal are gone.”
A laugh escaped him before he could stop it.
Sofia smiled.
Then she became serious.
“If there is a child connected to your family, and Rinaldi had his passport, you already know what Mia would say.”
Dominic did not ask.
He knew.
Children are not boxes.
They are not leverage.
They are not collateral.
Dominic folded the copy carefully.
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
May you like
“For making it sound simple.”
“It isn’t simple,” Sofia said. “It’s just right.”
