Chapter 4 - Seventy-Nine Seconds
The DNA result changed everything.
It did not prove Luca was alive that night, but it proved someone had taken a sample from him less than two years earlier.
I ordered Reeves to trace the hidden record.
Mateo learned that during the blackout somebody had opened Luca's sealed personnel file in the forty-second-floor archives.
Emergency identities, medical records, and trust credentials had been accessed.
Darius had been there minutes earlier.
Clara asked what Luca had warned her about beyond Victor.
She hesitated, then said there were three people he feared.
"Victor wants the throne," she remembered.
"The Banker wants the accounts.
The Heir wants the bloodline."
Mateo observed that I was the obvious heir.
Clara looked at me uneasily.
I asked what Luca had said when she challenged him about that.
Her answer chilled me.
"He said Sebastian doesn't know what he is yet."
Then she repeated another phrase Luca had forced her to memorize.
"When winter eats the moon, the wolf opens its second eye."
I recognized it from childhood treasure hunts at the red-door house.
I searched hidden real-estate records and found the Vermont property still existed under a shell company called Northern Red Holdings.
The tax account was active.
The account holder was Luca Alessandro Vale.
The most recent payment had been made eleven days earlier.
We were staring at proof that Luca's name was still being used in the present.
Emma wandered into my private library and found an old photograph tucked inside my father's copy of The Call of the Wild.
The picture showed my father, Luca, and me outside the red-door house twenty-one years earlier.
Fresh black ink covered the back.
SEBASTIAN, DON'T TRUST MATEO.
I lifted my eyes.
May you like
Mateo stood three feet away with his hand near his gun.
â
