Chapter 4 - THE WOMAN IN THE BURNED PHOTOGRAPH
Alejandro had not slept.
At four in the morning, he sat in his private office staring at a photograph.
It was twenty-two years old.
The edges were burned.
His sister Isabella stood beside their mother in the garden of the Duca estate.
Isabella was seventeen.
Dark-haired.
Smiling.
A silver bird pendant hung around her neck.
Alejandro touched the photograph.
He remembered the last night he saw her.
A family celebration.
Music.
Guests.
His father arguing with someone in the library.
Then Isabella disappearing before dawn.
The police searched.
Private investigators searched.
His father searched.
Or claimed to.
Nothing.
Two years later, their mother died.
Alejandro spent the next twenty years trying to discover what happened to his sister.
Now a waitress had sung the same lullaby Isabella used to sing.
Not merely the familiar melody.
The private variation their mother had invented.
A variation almost nobody outside the family knew.
Silas entered.
“We found her employment records.”
Alejandro looked up.
“Name?”
“Sophia Brooks.”
“Real name?”
Silas hesitated.
“We're still verifying it.”
Alejandro's expression hardened.
“Keep looking.”
Silas placed a photograph on the desk.
Sophia leaving the restaurant.
Alejandro studied it.
Something about her face bothered him.
The shape of her eyes.
The curve of her mouth.
A resemblance he had dismissed at first.
Now he couldn't ignore it.
Silas spoke.
“There's something else.”
Alejandro looked up.
“What?”
“Her grandmother died seven years ago.”
“And?”
“The woman's original identity appears to have been Elena Bellandi.”
Alejandro went completely still.
“Elena?”
Silas nodded.
Alejandro stood.
His chair scraped across the floor.
May you like
Because Elena Bellandi had once worked for his mother.
And she'd vanished the same night Isabella disappeared.
