Chapter 4 - THE SECRET INSIDE BUNNY
For seven years, Emma had carried that rabbit everywhere.
Bed.
School.
Doctor appointments.
Grocery stores.
The Moretti estate.
Elena had given it to her the last night we saw her.
I never questioned why the stitching around one ear looked different.
At the mansion, Damiano cut three stitches carefully.
Inside the stuffing was a tiny waterproof capsule.
Microfilm.
Encrypted storage card.
A brass key.
Matteo stared.
"That's old-school."
Elena knew digital evidence could be tracked.
So she divided it.
Flash drive held partial financial records.
The rabbit contained the master index connecting aliases to real identities.
The brass key corresponded to a bank deposit box in Manhattan.
Inside that box, according to Elena, was the original ledger.
Damiano looked at Emma.
She was sitting beside Elena's hospital bed.
Elena had survived surgery.
Emma didn't understand yet who she really was.
We had told her Elena was my sister.
Nothing more.
I wanted time.
Elena wanted truth.
"She deserves to know," Elena whispered.
"She's six."
"She deserves something."
I looked at Emma.
My daughter.
My niece.
Both.
I had spent years terrified biology could take her away from me.
Now Elena was alive.
What did that make me?
Elena seemed to read my fear.
"Sophia."
I looked at her.
"I'm not taking her."
My eyes filled.
"You don't know what you want."
"I know I haven't been her mother for seven years."
"You're her mother."
"So are you."
We both cried.
Damiano quietly left the room.
That mattered.
Powerful men rarely understood when their presence wasn't needed.
At noon, we told Emma enough.
Elena was her first mommy.
I was the mommy who raised her.
She listened with a serious expression.
Then asked:
"Can I have two?"
I burst into tears.
Elena laughed while crying.
"Yes."
Emma climbed carefully onto the hospital bed.
"Okay."
Children sometimes solve what adults spend years making impossible.
Meanwhile Victor vanished.
Isabella too.
Don Romano publicly denounced his daughter.
Privately, it nearly destroyed him.
"I raised her," he told Damiano.
"You raised the child she was."
Romano looked at him.
"Is there a difference?"
"Apparently."
The six dons finally signed the peace agreement two days later.
Not in the grand conference room.
At a plain reinforced table underground.
Emma signed a piece of paper too.
She called it the "no fighting contract."
Damiano kept it.
The real ledger changed everything.
Judges.
Officials.
Port inspectors.
Police commanders.
Business executives.
Victor's organization wasn't merely criminal.
It was institutional.
Damiano faced a choice.
Use the ledger to strengthen his own empire.
Or destroy Victor by giving pieces to law enforcement.
I expected him to choose power.
Instead, he contacted a federal prosecutor through an attorney.
Selective cooperation.
Not altruism.
Strategy.
But still.
"You could use this," I told him.
"I could."
"Why not?"
He looked toward Emma playing chess badly with Matteo.
"Because Victor almost killed her."
"You don't build an empire around revenge."
He looked at me.
"Who told you that?"
"No one."
"Good advice anyway."
The ledger led investigators to six arrests within a week.
Victor retaliated.
A Moretti warehouse burned.
A Romano convoy was ambushed.
One Russo lieutenant disappeared.
Then Isabella sent a video.
She sat inside an unknown apartment.
No makeup.
No silver dress.
Her voice was cold.
"Damiano, you always believed control made you strong."
She smiled.
"Let's see how strong you are when you lose something you actually care about."
The video shifted.
A camera pointed toward a playground.
Emma's school playground.
My blood turned to ice.
Damiano stopped the video.
"She's not going back."
I agreed.
Emma moved permanently into the estate temporarily.
So did I.
Elena remained under guard.
We became a strange household.
A Mafia boss.
A maid.
A supposedly dead accountant.
A six-year-old.
Twenty armed men.
And one elderly cook who complained that nobody respected breakfast schedules.
Then something changed.
Damiano began coming home earlier.
He ate dinner with Emma.
Played cards.
Fixed Bunny's ear himself.
Emma started waiting for him near the stairs.
"Mr. Moretti!"
He eventually said:
"Damiano."
She tried.
"Mr. Damiano."
He gave up.
One evening, I found him asleep in the library chair with Emma curled against his chest.
Bunny between them.
I stood in the doorway longer than I should have.
Elena appeared beside me.
"He's dangerous."
"I know."
"You're looking at him like you forgot."
"I didn't."
"Good."
I looked at her.
"Why does that sound like approval?"
"It isn't."
"It sounded like approval."
She smiled.
"Maybe a little."
That night, Damiano received another message.
No video.
One sentence.
Bring the rabbit to St. Gabriel's Cemetery tomorrow night, or Elena's second grave won't be empty.
The target had changed.
May you like
They wanted the evidence.
And now they knew exactly where it had been hidden.
