Chapter 7
The passage beneath the bridal suite was part of the original estate.
Service tunnels.
Wine storage.
A small emergency shelter from decades ago.
Bianca turned it into something else.
Evelyn had not spent three years inside one shallow chamber.
That would have been impossible.
They moved her among four rooms beneath different wings.
The bridal suite was where it began.
And where they returned her two days before Anna found the veil.
“Why bring you back there?”
“Renovation.”
I frowned.
Bianca planned to gut the old suite after Ethan’s birthday.
If construction opened the floor accidentally, Evelyn had to be gone.
Tonight’s move was supposed to be permanent.
“To where?”
“She said Hawthorne.”
An unused Castellano hunting property three hours away.
More isolated.
Harder to discover.
The veil had been Evelyn’s last chance.
“How many times did you try before?”
“Seven.”
I stared.
Doors.
Ventilation shafts.
Notes pushed behind shelves.
Once she convinced a kitchen worker to carry a spoon engraved with her initials upstairs.
The worker brought it to Bianca.
Evelyn never saw her again.
“What happened to her?”
“I don’t know.”
My anger became cold.
I found the worker’s name through old schedules.
Rachel Dunn.
She had not vanished.
She had been reassigned to a hotel owned by Marcus and later left Boston.
Alive.
That mattered.
Bianca had not built a murder machine.
She built a silence machine.
Move people.
Threaten jobs.
Borrow my authority.
Make every odd detail individually explainable.
That was smarter.
And in some ways uglier.
Because it required dozens of ordinary people to participate without understanding the whole crime.
I asked Anna:
“If you had found a note two months ago saying Evelyn was below the floor, what would you have done?”
She hesitated.
“Probably taken it to Mrs. Bianca.”
Exactly.
The system would have returned every warning to the person causing the danger.
We had designed loyalty like a funnel.
Everything moved upward.
May you like
Bianca positioned herself just beneath me.
Nothing threatening her could ever reach the top.
