Chapter 5 - The Confession in the Sunroom
The silence in the sunroom was deafening, broken only by the gentle ticking of the silver watch on the glass table between us. Vincent's chest heaved as if he were running a marathon, his eyes darting frantically toward the French doors, searching for his personal bodyguards who usually patrolled the perimeter veranda.
They weren't there. Luca had already replaced them twenty minutes ago.
"She wasn't supposed to have a child," Vincent whispered, almost to himself, his voice shaking with the realization that his carefully constructed web of lies had unraveled in an instant.
"You kept my twin sister locked in an underground cage for twenty-two years," I said, my voice so cold it seemed to freeze the morning light. "Why didn't you just kill her that night, Vincent? If you murdered our father, why leave Clara breathing?"
Vincent looked up at me, a bitter, twisted smile breaking across his pale lips. The disguise was completely gone now; the loving uncle had evaporated, leaving behind the bitter, resentful second-born son who had lived in Anthony Romano's shadow his entire life.
"You think I wanted to kill your father?" Vincent spat, a sudden flash of venom in his eyes. "Anthony was going to dismantle everything! He was preparing to transfer the family assets into legitimate trusts, handing the shipping lines over to federal oversight, cutting me out of thirty years of street profits! He was going to make us into soft, tax-paying sheep!"
"So you poisoned him in the boathouse," I said.
"He was drinking scotch with me when his chest seized," Vincent sneered, leaning back in his chair, no longer bothering to hide his cruelty. "He looked at me with those judgmental eyes, begging me to call the ambulance. But I just watched him fall. I took the watch off his wrist to keep as a trophy. But Clara... Clara had snuck down to the river to meet a boy from the village. She was hiding in the storage rafters. She saw everything."
My blood raged like molten iron beneath my skin, but I kept my hands flat on the table, forcing myself not to tear his throat out with my bare fingers. "And what did you do to an eight-year-old girl, Vincent?"
"I couldn't shoot my own niece," Vincent muttered, a sickening trace of self-righteousness in his voice. "I couldn't stomach pulling the trigger on an eight-year-old child. So I told the council she drowned in the storm. I locked her in the old river keeper’s cottage beneath the western ridge, behind the subterranean spillway. I brought her food. I gave her books. I kept her hidden from the world for twenty-two years!"
"You kept her as a hostage," I corrected him, the words dripping with poison. "A dead man's insurance policy in case I ever turned on you."
"And she was obedient!" Vincent hissed, slamming his fist onto the table. "She stayed quiet in the dark until three years ago, when she managed to seduce one of the guards I hired to watch her! She gave birth to that brat in secret! When I discovered the girl last week, I knew the secret couldn't hold any longer. A child can't be kept underground forever."
He looked at me, his eyes gleaming with desperate madness.
"I sent Marco down there an hour ago with three cans of gasoline, Damian," Vincent whispered, a hideous grin spreading across his face. "By now, the river cottage is an inferno. Your precious sister is turning to ash while you sit here talking to me. If I'm going to hell, Clara is going first!"
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Without a second's hesitation, I lunged across the glass table, my left hand closing around Vincent’s throat like an iron vise, lifting him entirely out of his chair.
"Luca!" I roared into the radio on my collar. "Breach the river keeper's cottage! Cut the gas lines! Move, move, move!"
