Chapter 2 - The Blue Room
Victor Costa arrived at Damian's office twenty-three minutes later.
I knew it was him before anyone said his name.
Some people enter a room and bring energy with them.
Victor brought temperature.
The office seemed to get colder.
He was sixty-one, silver-haired, elegant, and smiling in a way that never reached his eyes. His suit probably cost more than every hospital bill I still owed combined.
And on his right hand was a heavy black-and-gold signet ring.
The same crest stamped at the bottom of old Costa Imports documents.
The ring from Sofia's warning.
I stared at it too long.
Victor noticed.
His smile deepened.
“You must be the housekeeper everyone is talking about.”
Damian stepped between us.
“She has a name.”
“I'm sure she does.”
Victor's gaze returned to me.
“Mara, isn't it?”
I had not introduced myself.
Damian noticed that too.
“Why are you here?” he asked.
Victor sighed.
“Because half your men have locked the estate down, no one is allowed to leave, and I was told there was gunfire near Beatrice's room.”
He said her name easily.
Too easily.
No fear.
No concern.
Only annoyance.
“Mother is fine,” Damian said.
“Thank God.”
Victor made the sign of the cross.
His ring flashed beneath the desk lamp.
I thought about Sofia writing those words while knowing she might die.
Do not trust the man who wears our father's ring.
Our father.
Not Damian's father.
Ours.
That bothered me.
Sofia and I had the same father, Luis Reyes. He had vanished when I was eleven and Sofia was seven. My mother told us he had run off with another woman.
For years, I hated him.
Later, when Mom died, I stopped wasting energy on him.
But Sofia's letter said our father's ring.
What ring?
Victor looked at the photograph on Damian's desk.
His eyes stopped.
Just for a fraction of a second.
Then his expression smoothed.
“Who's the young woman?”
“My sister,” I said.
Victor looked at me.
“Was?”
The word hit like a slap.
He knew.
I saw it.
Damian saw it too.
“How do you know she's dead?” Damian asked.
Victor's eyes moved calmly between us.
“Mara's background was reviewed when she was hired.”
“By whom?”
“I assume Human Resources.”
“We don't have Human Resources.”
Victor smiled faintly.
“Well, there's your first administrative problem.”
Damian did not smile.
“Did you know Sofia Reyes?”
“No.”
“Did she ever contact you?”
“No.”
“Did she contact anyone in the Costa organization?”
“I wouldn't know.”
Damian leaned against the desk.
“My mother's hallway cameras were disabled tonight.”
“So I heard.”
“The blackout came through a restricted service panel.”
Victor's smile faded slightly.
“You're accusing me?”
“Not yet.”
Victor looked at me again.
“You should be careful, Damian. Grief makes desperate people imagine conspiracies.”
“I haven't imagined anything,” I said.
Victor's eyes sharpened.
For the first time, he stopped pretending I was furniture.
“Of course not.”
He turned back to Damian.
“Beatrice is ill. Severely ill. If she's saying names, it doesn't mean those names are part of some grand secret.”
“Interesting,” Damian said.
“What is?”
“I never told you she said a name.”
Silence.
Victor's face did not break.
But his fingers curled once around the head of his cane.
Damian walked to the door.
“Marco will escort you to the west guest wing.”
“I'm being detained in my nephew's house?”
“You're being protected.”
“From what?”
Damian opened the door.
“That's what I'm going to find out.”
Victor passed me on his way out.
As he did, he lowered his voice.
“Your sister should have learned when to stop asking questions.”
My blood froze.
I spun toward him.
“What did you say?”
But Damian had heard.
The room changed instantly.
Damian grabbed Victor by the front of his jacket and slammed him against the wall.
Guards reached for weapons.
Victor did not struggle.
He smiled.
“Careful, nephew.”
“What did you do to her?” Damian asked.
“Nothing.”
“You just admitted you knew her.”
“I admitted she asked questions.”
“What questions?”
Victor looked at me.
“That depends on how badly Miss Reyes wants to repeat her sister's mistakes.”
Damian's grip tightened.
“Get him out of my sight.”
Two guards took Victor away.
I stood there shaking.
“Why didn't you kill him?”
The question came out before I could stop it.
Damian looked at me.
“Would you trust me more if I had?”
I had no answer.
He released a slow breath.
“My father solved problems with bullets. Victor learned from him. I've spent half my life trying to decide which lessons I inherited and which ones I can still unlearn.”
That was the first honest thing he had said about himself.
Maybe that was why I believed him.
Not completely.
But enough.
An hour later, Beatrice woke from sedation.
She was calmer.
I sat beside her while Damian stood at the foot of the bed.
I showed her Sofia's note.
“Beatrice, what's the blue room?”
Her eyes wandered.
“Blue room?”
“Sofia said you would remember.”
At the sound of Sofia's name, her fingers tightened around the blanket.
Then she whispered, “Ocean house.”
Damian frowned.
“What ocean house?”
Beatrice looked at him as if he were a child.
“Half Moon Bay. Your father's summer place. Blue room upstairs. He hated it because the walls were the wrong blue.”
Damian stared.
“We sold that property twenty years ago.”
“No,” Beatrice said.
“Yes, Mother.”
“No.”
She became agitated.
“No sale. Wrong paper. Victor lies. Sofia knows. Blue room.”
My pulse raced.
Damian glanced at me.
Within fifteen minutes, one of his attorneys was on the phone.
Within forty, they had an answer.
The property had never been sold.
It had been transferred through a shell company and remained under a trust controlled by Beatrice.
Damian looked stunned.
His own mother had hidden a house from the family for two decades.
At 2:10 in the morning, we drove south.
I was still in my gray uniform.
Damian had changed into a black sweater and shoulder holster.
Two SUVs followed us.
Fog swallowed the highway.
For most of the drive, neither of us spoke.
Then Damian said, “You should have gone home.”
I looked out the window.
“To what?”
He glanced at me.
“My apartment has a broken heater, a landlord who keeps pretending not to see mold, and three collection agencies calling before breakfast. My sister is dead. My mother is dead. My father vanished. Right now the only person who might know why is your mother.”
“You have a life outside this.”
“I had a life outside this yesterday.”
He had no answer to that.
The ocean house sat on a cliff above Half Moon Bay, hidden behind cypress trees and a rusted iron gate.
It had once been beautiful.
Now it looked abandoned.
Paint peeled from the shutters.
Sea wind rattled loose gutters.
Inside, dust covered everything.
But there were no cobwebs across the main staircase.
Someone had been here.
Recently.
Damian saw it too.
He signaled to his men.
They cleared the first floor.
Then the second.
At the end of the upstairs hall, we found the blue room.
The walls were faded robin's-egg blue.
An old brass bed sat beneath a window facing the ocean.
A wardrobe leaned against the far wall.
Nothing else.
I searched drawers.
Damian checked the floorboards.
For twenty minutes, we found nothing.
Then I remembered Beatrice's words.
Wrong paper.
I went to the wall.
The wallpaper had been stripped years ago, but a narrow border remained near the ceiling.
One section was slightly newer.
“Damian.”
He came over.
I pointed.
He cut into the plaster with a pocketknife.
Behind it was a cavity.
Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, lay three things.
A small brass key.
A black ledger.
And a cassette tape.
Damian picked up the ledger first.
His face changed as he opened it.
Pages of handwritten payments.
Dates.
Names.
Police officers.
Judges.
Doctors.
Hospital administrators.
At the bottom of one page, I saw a name I knew.
Dr. Henry Vale.
Sofia's oncologist.
Beside his name was a payment.
$250,000.
Three days before my sister died.
My knees nearly gave out.
“What is this?” I whispered.
Damian took the book from me.
His face went white.
Before he could answer, glass shattered downstairs.
Gunfire exploded through the house.
Damian shoved me behind the bed.
“Stay down.”
More shots.
Men shouted.
One of Damian's guards fell in the hallway.
Then footsteps thundered up the stairs.
Damian fired twice through the doorway.
A body hit the wall outside.
I crawled toward the wardrobe and found a narrow gap behind it.
Cold air rushed through.
A hidden passage.
“Damian!”
He turned.
I pulled the wardrobe forward enough to reveal a service stairway descending inside the wall.
He grabbed the ledger, key, and tape.
We slipped through just as bullets tore into the blue room.
The passage led to a basement wine cellar and then to a door opening onto the cliffside.
Fog covered the rocks.
We ran.
Halfway to the cars, Damian suddenly stopped.
He pressed one hand to his side.
Blood spread through his sweater.
“You've been shot.”
“Grazed.”
“That is not a graze.”
“I've had worse.”
“I'm sure you say that to impress women.”
Even bleeding, he looked offended.
Then he almost smiled.
For one insane second, with bullets behind us and the Pacific roaring below, I wanted to laugh.
Then an SUV skidded around the corner.
Marco jumped out and opened the rear door.
“Move!”
We got inside.
As we sped away, Damian opened the black ledger again.
He stared at the page with Sofia's doctor.
Then he turned to the final page.
A single line was written there in my mother's handwriting.
LUIS REYES DID NOT LEAVE HIS FAMILY.
HE WAS KILLED FOR REFUSING TO FRAME DAMIAN COSTA.
I read it once.
Then again.
The man I had spent fifteen years believing abandoned us had died protecting a boy who would grow up to become the most feared man in San Francisco.
Damian looked at me.
And for the first time, fear entered his eyes.
Not fear for himself.
For me.
Because under my father's name, someone had written one more sentence.
MARA AND SOFIA MUST NEVER KNOW.
May you like
Signed,
Victor Costa.
