Chapter 12
Pia
Chasing A Deadman’s Clues
Idon’t sleep.Not for a second.Not after watching my father’s face curl into ash.
I sit with my back pressed hard against the icy wall, knees tucked to my chest, knife locked in my grip. The room feels too small. Too quiet. Too exposed. My eyes keep drifting to the window, the floorboard that creaked, the spot where someone stood and watched me break.
Because someone was here.And they know.
They know I lied.They know I’m close.They know I’m not the helpless little stray the Rivas family thinks I am.
My fingers tighten around the knife until my knuckles throb. The blade catches each weak flash of candlelight, sharp enough to cut through fear — if fear were something solid and not a pulse hammering in my throat.
The church finally settles.The storm above fades into low, distant thunder.Somewhere down the hall, Santino moves — slow, heavy footsteps, worn down by whatever he’s carrying. He doesn’t come back. Doesn’t check on me. He doesn’t hover like he almost did.
Good.I can’t afford him tonight.Not his questions.Not his concern.Not the way he looks at me, like he’s beginning to see the girl beneath the lies.
I wait for his door to close.Wait for the walls to stop holding their breath.
Then I rise.
The ache in my body hits hard — leftover adrenaline, bruised fear, the ghost of Santino’s hands on my skin after he killed for me. My limbs tremble, not from weakness but from overload. Too much emotion in a body already stretched thin.
“Move,” I whisper.
I slide the knife into the sheath at my thigh. My father’s map goes into my coat pocket. Hood up. Shoulders squared. Bare feet silent on warped floorboards as I slip into the hall.
Past the sanctuary.Past the pulpit.Past the altar where Santino once pretended his hands were clean.
The hidden access panel waits behind the velvet drape.Same place.Same tunnel.Different purpose.
Last time, I searched blind — chasing a dead man’s clues with a prayer and a reckless heartbeat.Tonight, I know exactly where I’m going.
I drop into the tunnel.
Cold air rushes up, thick with incense and rot. Torches flicker along the stone walls, throwing jagged shadows that stretch and warp as I move.
But I don’t take the path Santino used.I take the other one.Narrower. Older. Hidden.
The path marked on my father’s coded map — the one he died for — with a symbol the Rivas sons never deciphered.
The passage slopes downward, twisting tighter as it descends. My breath fogs. The walls draw in. Darkness presses close, heavy enough to feel on my skin.
I go anyway.
There’s a chamber deeper than the vault Santino opened.A chamber the Rivas heirs don’t know exists.Giovanni built a chamber of secrets that even his own blood could not access.
I reach the fork.Turn left.Run my fingers along the wall until I find it — a faint carved imprint, almost invisible unless you know what you’re searching for.
The sigil of a scapegoat.
My throat burns.My pulse spikes.
“He was here,” I whisper.
And tonight, I’m going to see everything he died for.
The Chamber Giovanni Died For
The tunnel narrows until I’m forced to turn sideways, my shoulder scraping along damp stone. The air drops in temperature the deeper I go—colder than the upper vaults, colder than the storm outside.Not natural cold.Engineered. Preserved.A warning delivered through the air itself.
My lantern flickers when the passage widens into a small alcove.
Symbols—old, jagged, carved with a ritualistic precision—arc across the stone overhead.
I recognize them from my father’s journal, from pages he kept locked away until the day he died.
He told me these markings belonged to the older families, the ones who built power long before the Rivas claimed their throne.
One symbol sears the breath from my lungs.
A crooked triangle slashed straight down the middle.
The mark of a scapegoat.
My stomach twists.My father didn’t just get framed.He was branded.
I lift trembling fingers and trace the symbol. Cold radiates from the stone, almost pulsing, like an old pain stored in the rock itself. My throat tightens.
“He was here,” I whisper. “Right here.”
The door in front of me is smaller than Santino’s vault—rounder, uneven, ancient. No Rivas crest. No serpent crown. No polished metal pretending to be divine.
Just stone.Scarred.Unforgiving.
Set into its center is the shallow imprint—the same strange shape carved into my father’s coded map. I reach into my coat with numb fingers and pull out the imprint key. It shifted the upper lock earlier, but didn’t open it.
This door accepts it instantly.
A hard click snaps through the corridor.Dust trickles from the ceiling.Then the stone shifts.
Grind. Groan. Drag.
Heavy internal locks disengage one by one, each vibration rolling through the floor and up my legs like a slow-building earthquake. When the door finally cracks open, stale cold air spills out.
Not sterile cold.
Cold that smells like metal.Like sweat.Like old blood.
My breath stutters.
I push the door wider and step inside.
The chamber is bare.Just three things:
A single metal table bolted to the ground.A metal chair chained to a ring on the floor.A reinforced safe with industrial rivets.
They did not build this place to store secrets.Someone built it to extract them.
My pulse kicks hard as I step forward. The lantern shakes in my grip, its light lurching across the metal. That’s when I see it — a dark streak trailing down the side of the table.
Dried, brownish-red.Old.
Blood.
My knees buckle. I catch myself on the table; the metal freezing beneath my palms.
“This is where it happened…”My voice fractures. “Papa…”
His last breaths — his fear,his pain,his final moments — all lived and died in this room.
My lungs burn.
Behind me, the door slams shut — a violent metallic crack echoes like gunfire.
I whirl around.
The lock hasn’t engaged.Not yet.
But the sound still shakes through me.
The air is cold.The chamber is silent.And I am standing in the room where someone murdered my father.
Alone.
The shadows lean closer, pressing me forward. Toward the safe. Toward the truth Giovanni buried here. Toward the evidence someone killed to hide.
I raise my lantern, its flame trembling across the floor — over the blood stains,over the chains,toward the safe bolted into the far corner like a coffin that’s waited years to be opened.
A shiver crawls down my spine.
Whatever lies locked inside that safe — Giovanni was willing to kill my father to protect it.
And I’m about to open it.
The Evidence No One Was Supposed to Find
The safe sits in the corner as if it’s holding its breath.Like it knows I’m about to rip open the reason my father died.
My hands tremble once, twice, before I wipe them on my thighs and force them still. My entire body buzzes—fear, adrenaline, fury—so sharp it feels like electricity carving through my veins.
“Pull the handle, Pia,” I whisper to myself, voice thin and cracking. “He died so you could.”
My fingers wrap around the cold iron. I brace my feet.I pull.
The latch releases with a heavy, echoing clunk.Dust drifts off the hinges in a soft gray fall as the door creaks open.Inside sits a single lockbox—small, unremarkable, the thing anyone else would overlook in a room marked by dried blood.
My pulse thuds as I lift it out.
It’s lighter than it looks.I open the lid.
Inside, arranged with meticulous care—as if someone intended these pieces to be found only by the right person—are the things my father died for:
Documents folded with surgical precision.A USB drive marked with numbers instead of letters.Old receipts, ink faded at the edges.Bank transfers that look nothing like the ones the Rivas accountants paraded as truth.On a torn napkin in Giovanni’s flowing script, the words fractured like a threat ripped in half.
But none of that stops my breath.
What freezes everything — my mind,my heartbeat,the entire room — is the cassette tape.
Black, unmarked except for two red letters:
P.M.
Pietro Moretti.My father.
My throat closes so hard I nearly choke. My vision blurs as I touch the tape like it might crumble beneath my fingertips.
“No,” I breathe. “Please… no.”
But I’m already reaching for the old recorder Giovanni kept beside the safe—a relic for collecting confessions he didn’t want digitized. My fingers shake violently as I push the cassette into place.
The recorder clicks.Whirs.Engages.
I press PLAY.
Static crackles.Then—
Giovanni’s voice fills the chamber.
Cold.Precise.Unhurried.
“You should not have seen that report, Pietro.”
My breath rushes out in a tremble.
Then — the voice I’ve been chasing for years.The one I feared I’d forgotten.
My father.
“I stole nothing,” he says, strained, pleading. “I swear to you, Giovanni—I only checked the numbers because they didn’t add up.”
My hand flies to my mouth as a sound breaks out of me—small, wounded, uncontrollable.
Giovanni’s reply is soft.
Too soft.
“You were loyal. That makes this unfortunate.”
A scuffle.Fabric scraping stone.A chair tipping.My father’s choked cry.A sharp blow.A wet, strangled sound that tears something open inside my ribs.
“Someone has to take the fall,” Giovanni murmurs. “And you… you will die quietly.”
I slam the PAUSE button.
A sob rips out of me—raw, violent, impossible to contain. I fold forward, one hand braced against the table, the other pressed hard to my mouth as if that could stop the scream clawing its way up my throat.
This is it.
This is the proof I’ve hunted my entire life.My father’s innocence.Giovanni’s guilt.My revenge, crystallized in cheap plastic and dying breath.
I force myself upright—barely. My chest burns. My eyes sting. I don’t remember the last time I cried like this, like something is being torn out of me piece by piece.
But now—
Now Santino exists in this world.In this blood.In this sin.
And I am falling for him.
My breath stutters, collapses into a shaky pulse.