Chapter 4
Rafael asked the bodyguards to take Sophie inside. She refused until I nodded to her. Even then she would not release the doll.
Once she was gone, I opened the next recording.
Elena was filming through a partly open door at Villa Aurelia at night. Bianca stood inside with Victor Lane, the man who drove Elena’s car on the day she died. Until that moment, I had believed Victor drank himself into the grave from guilt after an accident no one could have prevented. I had paid for his funeral. I had stood in front of his coffin.
Now I was watching him take orders from my sister.
Bianca told him my wife’s route had changed for the next day. Victor looked uncomfortable. He said Elena normally drove herself. Bianca answered that tomorrow she would not. When he asked why, she said Elena was going to learn what happened when she refused to leave.
I paused the video and looked at Bianca.
“You changed her route.”
She shrugged with a kind of brittle pride. “You want me to confess to murder because of one sentence?”
“I haven’t called it murder,” I said.
But I was thinking it.
Rafael resumed the file. Victor asked what exactly he was expected to do. Bianca slid a folded note across the table and told him to bring Elena to the north overlook and make her think Marco wanted to meet her there. When he asked what happened next, she hesitated just long enough for the truth to become visible.
“She gets scared enough to leave,” she finally said.
The video ended.
Marco rubbed a hand over his face. He looked physically ill. I asked him whether he knew any of this. He said he knew Bianca wanted Elena out and that she had been pressuring Victor, but he did not know about the north overlook. He said that as if ignorance about the final shape of the trap somehow made his silence cleaner.
It didn’t.
Rafael opened the next file. Elena was inside her car. Her breathing was fast. She said this was the morning after the villa meeting. She said if anything happened to her, I needed to know Bianca had changed her route.
Then she looked up from the camera and whispered one name.
“Marco?”
The recording cut there.
I turned toward my brother.
May you like
“You were there.”
And by the look on his face, I already knew the answer before he gave it.
