Chapter 22 Daniela
DANIELA
Raven and I pull into the garage and race into the house.
“Vinnie?” she calls.
“Office,” he barks back, his voice rough and caffeinated.
We pass through the living room, past last night’s strewn blankets and an abandoned water glass.
In the office doorway, the air is warmer and stale with coffee.
Vinnie’s at the computer, the blue light carving hollows under his eyes, four empty mugs to his right, a fifth cooling by his left elbow.
The desk is a field of tabs and printouts, yellow legal pad scrawls, a jumble of names and arrows and dates crisscrossing like battle plans.
He doesn’t look up. “I’m on it,” he says to the screen.
“How long since you blinked?” Raven asks, stepping in behind me.
He finally glances over. His eyes are bloodshot. “I’m fine.”
He is not fine. None of us are.
“Talk to us,” I say, keeping my voice level. “What do you have?”
Vinnie drags a spreadsheet onto the big monitor so we both can see.
A list of names blooms there—maids, gardeners, guards, tutors—everybody who touched the money and danger of my father’s life.
Beside each name, a sliver of a photo—a staff badge, a driver’s license, a wedding picture clipped from someone’s Facebook. A life. A record.
Except one slot is a hole. No name. No face. No dots to connect. Just a void that eats the grid around it.
“The chef,” Vinnie says. “Our phantom. I’ve got Lucía, Mateo, Rosa—hell, I even found a retired dog that used to patrol the east wall.
And not only that, I found Serena tucked away—the woman your father was hiding from my grandfather all those years, and he hid her well.
Still, I found shit on her. Everybody’s got a footprint.
Except that fucking chef. He wiped himself and the paper he stood on.
No income or customs trail. No apartment leases.
No medical records. No goddamned shadow. ”
Raven crosses her arms. “And Gordon Brown?”
“Pops up everywhere,” Vinnie says. “Which is exactly the problem. It’s a smoke grenade of a name. Public raffles, PTA lists in three states, a hobbyist chocolate blog that looks like it was built last Tuesday. All dead ends. Not one of them is the man who cooked for your father, Dani.”
My stomach flips. The memory of that Valentine’s Day card sits cold behind my ribs. The chocolates. And the roses—blood-red blooms strangled by rusty barbed wire so the thorns were redundant.
“Did you hear anything while you were down here?” I ask Vinnie. “Footsteps? Doorbell? Something?”
He shakes his head. “Anyone who came through would have to go through the security gate. I’d have gotten a call.”
“Yeah,” Raven says, “but here’s the thing. The DHS thing for Dani was a decoy. Judge Matthews checked it out for us this morning. So we figured—”
“Fuck,” he says. “You figured it was a way to get the two of you—or at least Daniela—out of the house.”
“Right,” I say. “So was anyone here?”
“Like I said, they’d have to go through security.”
“Not if they had a clicker,” Raven says. “Was anyone here?”
“I’ve been here the whole time, baby.” Vinnie grabs Raven’s hand.
“I know, but you’ve been focused and sleep deprived. Can you check the security footage?”
“Baby…”
“Please,” she says. “Humor us.”
He exhales hard through his nose and then wakes a different keyboard. The security grid comes into view—front door, garage, side gate, patio, back door, entrance to my mother-in-law suite. Time stamps tick green in the corners.
“Front door was good until—” Vinnie pauses. The box blinks, shows static, and then black. “Until thirty-nine minutes ago.”
“Thirty-nine minutes?” Raven’s voice sharpens. “While we were at the courthouse.”
I don’t realize I’ve started shaking until I see the tremor in my knuckles. I press the hand flat to the desk again, hard enough to feel bone. “Belinda’s room,” I say.
Then I run.
Out of Vinnie’s office, down the hallway, up the staircase.
Belinda’s door is ajar. I push it open with two fingers.
Everything looks exactly as we left it last night because it is exactly as we left it last night.
Except—
On her monitor, a new document sits open. I know it’s new because the cursor still blinks in the last blank space like a heartbeat.
If you want your starter back, give me dessert.
My mouth goes desert dry. “Starter,” I whisper, the word sticking like grit.
Raven’s beside me now. “Starter?”
“It’s her,” I say, and it comes out strangled. “Belinda. She’s the starter. The appetizer. Because… Because she’s so young.” My stomach lurches.
Raven goes pale. “What?”
I shake my head. “What I mean is… He used to say I was dessert. After he gave me a cooking lesson, he’d ask for dessert.” Shame burns my cheeks. “He thinks he’s being clever.”
“I’ll fucking kill him.” Vinnie’s voice is low and menacing. I’d be frightened if I didn’t know him.
“He wants a trade,” I say. “Me for her.”
“Dani, we don’t know that,” Raven says, her voice shaking.
I shiver despite the heat. I know it as well as I know my own name, as well as I know how his disgusting cock tasted in my mouth. Some things you can’t forget, no matter how much you want to.
“Trust me,” I say, trembling. “That’s what he wants. He’s asking for a trade.” A chill runs over my neck. “No. Not asking. Telling us. Me for her. Or he’ll…” I can’t finish.
“No.” Vinnie’s voice is iron. “No trades.”
“He’s not bluffing,” I say. “He means it. He always means it.”
Raven takes a breath that looks like it hurts. “Even if he does, we don’t know where to bring anything. We have nothing that tells us where he is.”
“We have the pattern,” I say. “He leaves clues. He always leaves clues for me. He likes the theater of it. He wants me to know it’s him.”
Vinnie scrubs a hand over his face. “What clues? We already bagged the card. The chocolate was obvious—Colombia. That was your ‘it’s me.’ The roses were their own sick poem.
The teddy bear had a live grenade tucked inside it, for Christ’s sake.
There’s not a riddle left that doesn’t blow our hands off. ”
I flinch at the memory of the bear. We were inches from an obituary. We’re still inches from one.
The thought chills me.
He was willing to let me die if he couldn’t have me.
Which means he’s willing to let Belinda die. She’s nothing to him.
“The note,” Raven says quietly. “The one that came with the roses.”
“It’s in the kitchen,” I say. “We got it back from the lab. They didn’t find DNA. Vinnie left it on the counter in the evidence bag.” I look at him.
He nods. “Right side of the sink. Behind the breadbox.”
I pivot. “Let’s go.”
In the kitchen, the coffee machine is still on. The counter on the right side of the sink is clean—too clean. The breadbox, and…
No evidence bag.
Only a small pink rectangle propped against the base of the breadbox. The envelope’s paper has a faint satin sheen, like a cheap valentine trying to look expensive.
My name is written on the front in hand-lettered calligraphy that imitates kindness.
Daniela.
The room tilts again. For a heartbeat, the envelope eats the world.
Raven sees it as I lift my hand. “Don’t,” she says, the word quick and quiet at the same time. “Wait.”
Vinnie moves, and I register the gentle pressure of his palm at my elbow, reining me in from the impulse to snatch, to tear, to read.
He grabs a pair of nitrile gloves from the drawer by the fridge, snaps them on, and passes another pair to me.
I tug them over fingers that don’t feel like my own. Nothing does anymore.
We crowd the counter, three bodies making a wall around a pink square.
Vinnie leans in and sniffs, and for a stupid heartbeat I want to laugh because it’s so meticulous and absurd.
And necessary.
“Angle your phone light,” he says.
Raven obeys, phone tilted, the beam slicing clean along the envelope’s edges. No seams ripped and resealed. No raised bulge beyond what a single thin page would make. No powder dusted along the flap. No telltale mechanical secures. No string. Just a small sticker—a golden heart—sealing the flap.
“See?” Raven whispers. “He wants you to read it.”
Of course he does. He lives for drama.
My stomach heaves. I swallow it down, breathe.
“In a second,” Vinnie says. “Let me shoot it.”
He takes three photos from three angles, timestamped, and then one with my gloved hand hovering close and another with it farther away. Then he steps back and nods at me.
I slide the envelope toward me, slowly and carefully. It makes the driest whisper against the counter. The heart sticker is centered as if it’s jeering at me.
I hook a gloved fingernail under the edge.