Chapter 4 - The Photograph in the Ice
Luca sprints across the wet floor, his polished Italian dress shoes splashing through murky water.
"Help me with this lever!" Luca roars, his composure instantly shattering into raw fury.
Daniel grabs the secondary steel latch while Luca throws his entire weight against the frozen lock bar.
The heavy metal groans in protest, rusted hinges screeching as the seal finally tears apart.
The heavy door swings wide into the darkness.
Inside the tiny, windowless concrete vault, the temperature is below freezing.
Frost clings to the rough ceiling pipes and sparkles like crushed sugar across the floor.
Huddled in the corner, sitting on an overturned plastic bucket, is an elderly woman.
Her thin grey hair is frozen into stiff, brittle wisps against her pale cheeks.
She wears an embroidered green florist's apron over a threadbare wool cardigan.
Her lips are a pale, ghostly lavender, and her fingernails are dark blue from severe hypothermia.
Luca immediately strips off his custom black wool suit jacket.
He kneels down in the frost and wraps the heavy, warm fabric tightly around her trembling frame.
"Ma'am, can you hear me?" Luca asks, his voice thick with rare urgency. "I need you to stay with me."
The woman looks up, her glazed, watery eyes struggling to focus on his striking features.
"You... you are the Moretti boy," she whispers, her teeth clattering against each other violently.
"I am Luca Moretti," he replies, lifting her frail, featherweight body into his arms.
"You are safe now. Daniel, call the estate medical team down here this second!"
"No... wait," Martha Vance gasps, her frozen fingers clawing weakly at the lapel of his white shirt.
"Please... listen to me before she... before she finds out I'm alive."
"Save your breath, ma'am, you have severe hypothermia."
"I don't care about my life, Mr. Moretti," she wheezes, a shudder racking her tiny chest.
"I came here to stop this wedding... she is going to murder you the way she murdered my boy."
Luca stops in the doorway of the vault, his entire body locking into rigid stone.
"What did you say?"
With agonizing slowness, Martha reaches her trembling, numb hand into the front pocket of her apron.
She pulls out a cracked, water-damaged photograph encased in a thin plastic ziplock bag.
She presses the plastic into Luca’s hand, her skin burning with the strange, fiery heat of late-stage freezing.
"Her name isn't Vanessa Bellini," Martha whispers, tears freezing as they spill onto her wrinkled cheeks.
"Her real name is Victoria Campbell."
Luca slowly looks down at the faded glossy photograph.
The image shows a sunny afternoon on the steps of a small brick chapel in rural Indiana.
A younger, less polished version of Vanessa stands in a simple white lace wedding dress.
Her hair is brown instead of dyed blonde, but her distinctive green feline eyes are unmistakable.
Her arm is hooked tightly around the waist of a smiling, handsome young man in a military dress uniform.
"That is my son, Julian," Martha weeps softly.
"He was an engineer in the Navy. He inherited three million dollars from his grandfather's estate in 2018."
"Six months after that picture was taken, Julian fell off a chartered yacht in Lake Michigan."
"The police ruled it an accidental drowning... they never found his body."
"Two weeks later, his entire trust fund was emptied into an offshore account in the Cayman Islands."
"And Victoria Campbell vanished without a trace."
Luca stares at the young man's face in the photo, a cold, calculating fury settling into his bones.
"How did you find her here?" Luca asks, his voice terrifyingly quiet.
"I saw her photo in the Chicago Tribune society section last Sunday," Martha whispers.
"Announcing the grand engagement of Luca Moretti to the wealthy heiress of the Bellini shipping fortune."
"I bought the flowers from the wholesaler, forged the delivery sheet, and drove here myself."
"I only wanted to look her in the eye and ask where she hid my boy's remains."
"When she saw me in the corridor, she dragged me into this room."
"She told me Julian was at the bottom of the harbor with fifty pounds of chain wrapped around his ribs."
"She said if I didn't drink the sleeping pills she had in her purse, she would lock me in here to freeze."
"That sweet girl... the maid with the gentle eyes... she heard me screaming."
"She ran in to try and hold the door open."
"Victoria kicked her down the stairs and slammed the steel bolts shut."
Daniel steps into the cooler, his face grim as the estate paramedic team rushes in behind him with a stretcher.
"Boss," Daniel says quietly, watching Luca's expression. "What do we do with Miss Bellini?"
Luca stands slowly, folding the photograph and slipping it securely into his front trouser pocket.
His face is completely devoid of emotion, but his eyes burn with a dark, lethal promise.
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"We let my beautiful fiancée finish her champagne," Luca says, his voice as smooth as silk.
"And then we show our distinguished guests what happens to a black widow in my house."
