300

300

Two hours after that, Val was standing outside the home of Antonio De Luca. The lights were out, but she knew he was in there — Luca had made sure before he brought her here.
Wielding her crutches she made it to the door and knocked vigorously.

Antonio answered, appearing surprised to see her. "Valentina? What are you doing here? You should be resting—"

"Did you know?" Val's voice was cold. "Did you realise Bianca was my mother's sister?"

Antonio's face went pale. He peered at her for a long moment, then moved aside, and she entered the house.

He slumped in a chair inside, moon-faced and shellshocked. "No," he said finally. "I didn't know. Isabella never told me. She had secrets, Valentina. Many of them. There were times she would vanish, for days, and return a changed person. Haunted."

“She was saving us,” Val said in disgust, flicking the letters at him. They rained onto his lap and the floor. "From Bianca. From you. From everything."
\`
Antonio grabbed one of the letters, his hands shivering as he stared at the words. Tears were starting to roll down his face.

“One week before she died,” Antonio said softly, “Isabella asked me for a divorce. She said she was afraid. Not me—I was thinking she meant she was afraid of me, but now I see. She was afraid of Bianca."

"Why didn't you protect her?" Val's voice was sharp, accusatory.

“Because I didn’t know what to protect her from! Antonio's voice broke. "She wouldn't tell me. She said the less I knew, the safer we would be. And then she died. I got fifteen years of sitting here thinking I could have saved her if I’d tried harder to understand what she was so afraid of.”

She looked up at her father and into the look of real sorrow on his face. She wasn’t even sure if it had been guilt or love. But it didn't matter. He was too late to save Isabella.

“Describe to me whatever you know of Bianca’s operations,” Val said. "Everything. Every little thing, every connection, every person that she’s worked with. If I’m gonna go after her, I gotta know what I’m walking into.”

Antonio spent the next hour telling her everything — Bianca’s legal enterprises and her illegal ones, where she was connected in Naples, who owed her favors. Val filmed everything on her phone, sending it to Luca as things were happening.

By the time she departed, she'd learned more about what Bianca was. But the knowledge didn’t make her any less terrifying.
\---

The ancient church was small, perched on the rim of Naples like an abandoned prayer. It had been vacant for decades, its stonework disintegrating, its stained glass windows blacked out. But someone had resented it recently — the doors were oiled, the locks were operable.

Val puhed the door open, a heavy wooden thing and went inside. Her crutches clacked on the hard stone.

Inside, dozens of candles were burning and the whole place was full of pools of warm light in the great darkness. The altar was banked with white lilies—real lilies, and their perfume filled the room.

"Hello, Valentina." Bianca stepped out of the gloom at the back of the chancel dressed, as ever, in black beautiful and terrible. “You could be Isabella’s twin. It's almost uncanny."

Val stayed where she was, her crutches supporting her. Luca was watching, via her collar’s hidden mini-cam. Listening through the wire in her jacket, he heard every word.

"Why did you kill my mother?" Val asked, her voice steady.

Bianca laughed—soft and sad. "Kill her? Sweetheart, I loved Isabella. She was my sister. My only sister."

"You hated her," Val said. "The letters—"

“The letters convey one point of view,” Bianca cut in, coming closer into the light of the candle. Val watched tears cling to Bianca’s flawless face. “But there is always more than one story, isn’t there? Isabella considered me the bad guy. The cruel sister stranded in a house of horrors. But she never understood — I didn’t stay because I was broken. I remained, because I was strong. I hung around and I lived through it, and I created something beautiful.”

“You made a criminal empire off of dead people,” Val said. “The letters talk about your first husband.”

"An accident," Bianca said coldly. "He fell down the stairs. Very tragic. Very convenient."
"For you."

"For everyone," Bianca corrected. He was going to divorce me, half my money goes out the door. I couldn't allow that. So I made a choice."
Val’s hand went to the gun resting on her hip beneath her jacket — Luca had made sure because Luca had known, he really had.

But Bianca saw the movement and smiled.

“Your mother had so many secrets,” Bianca said. "Did she speak to you of me in those dear letters? Did she tell you everything?”

"She told me you killed her."

“No,” Bianca replied, and her face turned into something that very well could be pure regret. "She said before she died that; your father killed her. Or, as he had it, that he killed her.”

Val's breath caught. "What?"

“Antonio was not in love with Isabella the way she deserved,” Bianca said. “He loved her money, her family connections, her beauty. But when she wanted out — when she demanded a divorce and threatened to reveal to authorities his illicit activities — he became a risk. So he arranged an accident. When the breaks fail at a steep rode. It seemed mechanical, but it wasn’t.”

"You're lying," Val whispered. But even as she spoke the words, pieces were snapping into place. How Bianca had gone after her whole family. How she’d seemed to have known so much. The way her hatred felt personal but also … righteous, in some twisted way.

"I'm not lying," Bianca said. “I’ve been collecting evidence for 15 years. I’ve been waiting for you to be old enough, strong enough, to hear the truth about your father. I wanted you to hear about what he did. We didn't need to know who."

"Yes, you did," Mr. Thompson argued through sobs as his son frowned in disbelief at the man he'd finally assented to bring into his home, heard blaming everyone else for his misery. "I wanted you to know that your mother was a victim of all this too, just like you and her sister."

“So all of this—” Val waved her hand toward everything—“the kidnapping, the threats, going after Luca… it’s because you wanted me to know what happened?”

"This entire thing here," said Bianca, "was a question of getting your father to pay for what he did. For taking Isabella from me. For destroying the only one who attempted to save me from our father’s legacy.”

In the light of the candle, Bianca’s face looked a mix between sorrow and fury and something more sinister than both—a madness born out of years of obsession.

"You're insane," Val said quietly.

"Perhaps," Bianca agreed. "But I'm your family. Your blood. And I know what your father is. What he's always been. A killer who kills in the name of respectability and business.”

Val’s hand made it to the gun, but she wasn’t able to pull it out before Luca’s man attacked.

They swooped down from the rafters of the church, with guns and tactics flying, seconds later they had Bianca surrounded. Luca too came out from the entrance, his weapon pointed at Bianca’s chest.

“Valentina, get away from her,” he said.

Bianca slowly raised her hands, a sly smile dancing on her lips.

“Anything I tell you — did it have to be said? she asked Val. “Did I tell you the truth about your father?”

“You gave me your take of it,” Val said. “If it is so or not, let others decide now."

“Luca Caruso,” Bianca said, looking at him for the first time. "I underestimated you. That was my mistake. I believed sentiment would soften you. I believed love would expose you. Instead, it made you stronger."

“Valentina made me stronger,” Luca said. Then, to his men: "Take her."

As they took Bianca away she looked back to Val one last time.

“Your mother loved you more than she did freedom,” Bianca shouted. "Remember that. And ask yourself was your father ever worth what she sacrificed.”

She walked out and swung the church doors behind her.

Val not only had her family’s business to barter on, and her father’s name, but its history: His own father hunted in with Val by his side.The tale-became-legend made him seem all the more valueless, all the more a fallen prince of a kingdom that would have been his.