Part 4 — I Mentioned the Beauty of the Head of Security in Front of the Boss — His Expression the Next Morning Frightened Me

Blake took the phone from my hand, but it was already too late. The call had ended.

For several seconds, only the ticking of the old clock could be heard in the warehouse.

“What document?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Blake replied.

“Are you telling the truth for the first time?”

He did not avert his gaze.

“For the first time, I no longer have the right to hide anything from you.”

Bryce took out his phone.

“I am going to the police station.”

“You will not go alone,” Blake told him.

“If we all go together, Lorenzo will realize that we heard the recording.”

“He already knows anyway.”

Blake’s phone rang again. This time it was his lawyer, Daniel Hart.

“Daniel, tell me the hospital story is a lie.”

The lawyer answered something. The color drained from Blake’s face.

“No. You did not make any transfers with my signature. I do not care who showed you the document.”

A pause.

“If you leave now, I am ending your protection.”

He ended the call.

“Money was transferred in my name to high-ranking police officials,” he said. “Lorenzo is trying to shift the whole case onto me.”

“And your lawyer?”

“He refuses to work for me until I prove that this is falsification.”

Bryce placed a folder on the table.

“Now we have the recording, the transfers, and his father’s list. But we need the second document from the safe.”

“We are going to my mother,” I said.

“I am coming with you,” Blake said.

“Not because I am yours.”

“Because being beside you is my choice.”

For the first time I heard a request instead of power in his voice.

At seven in the evening we entered through the hospital’s rear entrance. A strong smell of disinfectant stood in the corridor, and a small paper bird was attached to my mother’s room door. It was exactly like the red-enamel mark of my copper key.

“Who left this here?” I asked.

The nurse shrugged.

My mother was sitting on the bed in the room. Her face was pale, but her eyes were alive.

“Bella,” she told me, “your father knew that one day you would have to return to the Carusos.”

“You knew about all this?”

Mother looked at Blake.

“His father did not kill your father, Blake. He was trying to save him.”

Blake froze in place.

“What are you saying?”

“Lorenzo came that night. Your father offered to help both of them escape. But Lorenzo found out.”

Mother took a small wooden box from under the bed. My key fit exactly into the lock.

Inside lay one document — a contract by which Blake’s father was leaving his position and transferring all his property to a public fund. And my father was named as the recipient.

“Your fathers were supposed to finish all this together,” Mother said. “But Lorenzo betrayed them both.”

Blake read the document. His hands began to tremble.

“My father never told me that he saved me.”

“Because he knew the truth would also make you a target.”

At that moment Bryce appeared at the door.

“The police are here. But Lorenzo’s people are also in the building.”

Before I could say anything, the sound of a gunshot rang out in the corridor.

Mother seized my hand.

“Bella, there is one more thing in the box.”

I took a small recorder from the wooden bottom. I was not even going to turn it on, but I already knew that this night no longer concerned only our family’s past.

Lorenzo’s voice sounded from the recorder.

“If Blake survives, he will provoke Bella. He does not know that she herself owns the share that is the key to the whole empire.”

Blake lowered his eyes.

“What share?” I asked.

Mother answered:

“Your father left everything in your name.”

The next half hour turned into noise, footsteps, and commands.

The police entered through the rear door. Bryce moved my mother to a safe room. Blake stopped two armed men belonging to Lorenzo in the corridor, but he did not shoot.

“Put the weapons on the floor,” he told them. “This is over.”

One of the men laughed.

“You still will not be able to arrest your uncle. All the evidence is in your name.”

I handed the recording to the police chief.

“Not all of it.”

At ten at night Lorenzo Caruso was arrested in the hospital’s underground parking lot. He had documents made with my forged signature in his hands.

His lawyer could not come. Daniel Hart voluntarily handed copies of the accounts to the police and stated that the Caruso family had been deceiving people for years.

Lorenzo looked at me angrily.

“You understand nothing about the world you entered.”

“That is true,” I answered. “But now I know what truth sounds like.”

The next day Blake locked his own office. In the morning I went there to collect my things.

My copper key lay on the desk. Beside it was a small letter.

“You were never my property. If you stay, it will be only because you yourself want to.”

My father’s photograph hung on the wall. Below it, the view of the city no longer looked like conquered territory. It was simply a city.

Three weeks later my mother returned home.

Blake closed Caruso’s illegal operations and transferred to the foundation the property that had been revealed by my father’s documents. Bryce moved to a legal security company. For the first time, both began living under their own names.

And I moved to another city.

In the mornings I worked at a small publishing house. I corrected manuscripts, drank sugarless coffee, and no longer checked the door lock every five minutes.

My mother called me once a week. On Saturdays we baked a cake together. On the windowsill, her granddaughter, little Nino, hung colorful paper birds.

One cold morning Nino asked me:

“Aunt Bella, what does this key open?”

I took the copper key in my hand. The red-enamel bird sparkled in the ray of sunlight.

“What a person hides for the longest time,” I told her.

A few days later I received a message from Blake.

“I want to talk to you. This time I will ask nothing of you.”

I held the phone in my hand for a long time.

Then I wrote to him:

“I no longer need a conversation. I need peace.”

No answer came from him.

The following week the first snow came. Nino drew a large bird on the window with her finger. I placed the key beside it, but this time I did not put it in my pocket.

I left it at home.

For the first time, I locked the door myself.