Chapter 4 - The Truth Damian Buried for Eleven Years
The video stopped.
For several seconds, no one moved.
Then Camille reached across the counter and closed the laptop.
The click sounded enormous.
“Tell me.”
Damian knew exactly what she meant.
He also knew there was no version of the truth that would make him look innocent.
He pulled out a chair.
Camille remained standing.
“I was nineteen,” he began. “My father had started giving me limited work at the docks. Mostly paperwork. Inventory. Things he thought I couldn’t ruin.”
“Did you know my father?”
“Not well. He was one of the few adults there who talked to me like I wasn’t Vittorio Moretti’s son.”
Something almost like affection passed through his voice.
“He corrected my math once in front of six men. My father laughed for ten minutes.”
Camille’s eyes filled.
“That sounds like him.”
Damian continued.
“Arthur came to me because he found invoices with my authorization code. I had never signed them. When I checked, I found shipments routed through Pier Nine after midnight.”
“Weapons?”
“I suspected it.”
“And Salvatore?”
“I suspected him too.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police?”
Damian gave her a tired look.
“Because two detectives on the port task force were already on his payroll.”
Camille looked away.
“Of course they were.”
“I told my father. He told Arthur to leave Baltimore with you and your mother until he could clean house.”
“But my father stayed.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because he had copied everything. He thought if he disappeared, Salvatore would destroy the evidence and keep using the foundation.”
Camille pressed her palms against the counter.
“And the night he died?”
Damian’s voice lowered.
“He called me.”
She looked at him.
“He said Salvatore had contacted him and wanted to trade—his family’s safety for the evidence. Arthur planned to go to Pier Nine.”
“You told him not to.”
“I begged him not to.”
The word begged sounded strange in Damian Moretti’s mouth.
“He told me I was nineteen and believed powerful men could be stopped by waiting for older powerful men to handle them.”
A bitter smile touched Damian’s face.
“He said sometimes you had to stand in front of the thing that frightened you and make it blink first.”
Camille shut her eyes.
Her father had said that to her before every school debate.
Stand in front of fear and make it blink first.
Damian watched recognition move across her face.
“He left,” Damian continued. “I followed him.”
Her eyes opened.
“What happened?”
“I saw him enter the warehouse with Salvatore and Lucien. I called my father. By the time his men arrived, the building was burning.”
“You went inside?”
“Yes.”
Damian looked down at his left hand.
Camille had seen the pale burn scar crossing the inside of his wrist hundreds of times and never asked about it.
“I found Arthur near the loading doors.”
Her face crumpled.
Damian’s voice became quieter.
“He was alive.”
Camille stepped backward as if struck.
“No.”
“He was alive, Camille.”
“Then why—”
“The roof started coming down. I tried to move him. He had been shot.”
She stopped breathing.
“The fire wasn’t what killed him?”
“No.”
Tears spilled down her face.
Damian continued because stopping would be cowardice.
“He gave me something. A key. He told me there were two copies of the evidence. One with him and one somewhere Salvatore would never look. Then he made me promise to leave.”
“You left him?”
The question was almost soundless.
Damian’s expression broke for the first time that night.
“I had no choice.”
“You left him there.”
“The beams were coming down. Nico’s father dragged me out.”
Camille turned away.
She walked to the window and covered her face.
Damian did not follow.
Some grief deserved space.
After a long time, she asked, “Did my mother know he was shot?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“My father believed the fewer people who knew, the safer you were. Salvatore had already blamed the fire on an electrical failure. Arthur’s body was badly burned. The shooting was buried.”
“And you let us believe it.”
“Yes.”
Her shoulders shook.
Damian hated himself for the answer.
“But you kept investigating,” she said.
“Yes.”
“For eleven years?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He stared at her back.
“Because your father died after trusting me with the truth.”
“That’s not the only reason.”
“No.”
She turned.
“What else?”
Damian looked at Camille Rhodes, barefoot in his shirt, tear tracks on her face, one silver earring lying in pieces on the kitchen counter.
He could lie.
He had lied by omission for two years.
He was suddenly too tired to do it again.
“Because he asked me to keep you safe.”
Her expression hardened.
“You keep saying that like it excuses everything.”
“It doesn’t.”
“Then stop using it.”
“I’m not.”
“You hired me because of him.”
“Yes.”
“You investigated me before I ever walked into your office.”
“Yes.”
“You controlled what I knew.”
“Yes.”
Each answer cut deeper.
Camille wiped her cheeks.
“And somewhere in all of that, you decided you were jealous of who I danced with?”
Damian’s jaw tightened.
“That has nothing to do with your father.”
“How convenient.”
“It is the least convenient thing that has happened to me in years.”
Despite her anger, she almost laughed.
Almost.
Then her face crumpled again.
“I loved you.”
The room stopped.
Damian’s breath left him.
Camille looked just as shocked as he felt, as if the words had escaped without permission.
She laughed once through her tears.
“God. I wasn’t going to say that.”
Damian took one step toward her.
“Camille.”
“No.”
She raised a hand.
“I loved you when I thought I knew what I was standing next to. I loved you when I thought the worst thing about you was that you were emotionally constipated and terrifying before coffee.”
Nico, somewhere in the hallway, became extremely interested in a security monitor.
Camille’s voice cracked.
“I cannot decide what I feel about a man who built our entire relationship on a secret about my father.”
Damian stopped moving.
The words relationship struck him harder than they should have.
“We didn’t have a relationship.”
Her eyes flashed.
“That is exactly the problem.”
She turned and walked down the hallway.
Damian stayed where he was.
He heard a bedroom door close.
Nico appeared two minutes later.
“You handled that badly.”
Damian stared at him.
Nico lifted both hands.
“I’m just saying, if I ever confess eleven years of family secrets to a woman who then tells me she loves me, I’m probably not going to answer by clarifying that technically we were never dating.”
“Get out.”
“Already going.”
At four in the morning, Camille emerged carrying her purse and wearing her old office clothes from an emergency bag Nico had found in the car.
Damian stood from the sofa.
“Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“You cannot go home.”
“To my mother’s.”
He went still.
“In Richmond?”
“Yes.”
“That is the first place Salvatore will look if he thinks—”
“He already knows who I am. Hiding my mother from me doesn’t protect her.”
Damian knew she was right.
“I’ll send security.”
“No Moretti men in her house.”
“Camille.”
“You said I can hate you later. It’s later.”
The words were quiet, which made them worse.
She reached the door.
Damian did not stop her.
He did, however, put two unmarked protection vehicles half a mile behind the car Nico arranged for her.
Camille knew.
She did not call to complain.
That frightened him more.
The ride to Richmond gave Camille too much time to remember.
She remembered Damian standing behind her during her first week while she reorganized his impossible calendar, saying nothing until she finally asked whether he planned to breathe over her shoulder all afternoon.
She remembered the winter morning she arrived with a fever and found every meeting canceled before she had admitted she was sick.
She remembered a birthday two months earlier when a small box of expensive fountain pens appeared on her desk with no card. Damian had denied knowing anything about it while using one of the pens twenty minutes later.
Those memories had once felt like evidence of quiet affection.
Now each one came with a second possibility.
Had he been caring for her?
Watching her?
Protecting a promise to a dead man?
Or doing all three until even he could no longer separate them?
At a gas station outside Fredericksburg, Camille stepped away from the car and called Nico.
He answered with, “If this is about the two vehicles behind you, I take no responsibility.”
“Did Damian tell you to say that?”
“No. Damian told me not to answer if you called angry.”
She almost smiled. “Coward.”
“Professional survivor.”
Camille leaned against the brick wall. “When did he start caring about me?”
Nico went silent.
“That is not a security question.”
“I know.”
“Then why ask me?”
“Because he will turn it into a legal deposition if I ask him.”
Nico sighed. “I don’t know the exact date. But about nine months after you started, a rival firm offered you a job. Damian found out before you did.”
Camille remembered the offer. Double her salary. She had declined.
“What happened?”
“He spent two days being unbearable.”
“That proves nothing.”
“He made me investigate the company’s CEO.”
“That proves control issues.”
“He also raised your salary without telling you why.”
Camille went quiet.
Nico’s voice softened. “He hired you because of Arthur. He kept you because you were good. Somewhere after that, he started arranging his day around when you arrived and pretending he wasn’t.”
Camille closed her eyes.
“That doesn’t excuse the secrets,” Nico added.
“No.”
“But it might help you separate the lies from the things that were real.”
She thanked him and hung up.
By the time Richmond appeared on the highway signs, Camille was no less angry.
But the anger had become more complicated.
By noon, she was sitting at her mother’s kitchen table in Richmond with the remains of her childhood spread around her—old photographs, tax papers, recipe cards, and a faded copy of The Count of Monte Cristo.
Laura Rhodes looked fifteen years older than she had the day before.
“You knew,” Camille said.
Her mother stared into untouched tea.
“Not everything.”
“But you knew Dad was afraid.”
“Yes.”
“You knew the Morettis were involved.”
Laura swallowed.
“Your father told me Vittorio was trying to help him.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because after Arthur died, a man came to this house.”
Camille went still.
“What man?”
“Salvatore Moretti.”
Her mother’s hands began to shake.
“He sat where you’re sitting. He put a photograph of you on the table. You were walking out of school. He told me accidents happen to daughters too.”
Camille’s blood went cold.
“So I kept quiet. I moved us. I changed phone numbers. And every year, on the anniversary of your father’s death, I received the same envelope.”
“What was in it?”
“A photograph of you.”
Camille stared at her.
“For eleven years?”
Laura nodded.
Then she stood and went to the pantry.
From behind a loose baseboard, she pulled a narrow metal box.
“Your father told me to give you this only if someone ever said the words blue weather.”
Camille looked at the box.
Inside was a key.
A photograph of Pier Nine.
And a sealed letter addressed in Arthur Rhodes’s handwriting.
Not to Camille.
To Damian Moretti.
She opened it.
The first line made her sit down.
Damian,
If I’m dead, your uncle will try to make my daughter believe your family killed me.
Do not let her believe the wrong monster.
The second page held a handwritten list of names.
May you like
At the bottom, beneath Salvatore Moretti, Lucien Ferraro, and Vivian Blackstone, was a fourth name Camille did not recognize.
JULIAN CROSS.
