Chapter 5 - The Man on Her Father’s List
Camille read Julian Cross’s name four times.
Each time it looked more impossible.
Twenty-four hours earlier he had been a stranger with an easy smile, offering his hand on a dance floor.
Now his name sat in her dead father’s handwriting beneath three people connected to theft, weapons, and murder.
Laura Rhodes leaned over the table.
“Do you know him?”
“I met him last night.”
Her mother went pale.
Camille reached for her phone.
She stopped with her thumb over Damian’s name.
Every part of her was still angry.
But anger was not the same as stupidity.
She called.
He answered before the first ring finished.
“Camille.”
There was no greeting.
Just her name, like he had been holding his breath since she left.
“I found a letter from my father.”
A pause.
“Are you safe?”
“I’m at my mother’s.”
“I know.”
Of course he knew.
She closed her eyes.
“Damian.”
“I said I would put people on you.”
“I said not to.”
“And someone shot at you twice in twelve hours.”
“This is not the time.”
“No. It isn’t.”
His voice changed.
“What does the letter say?”
“Julian Cross is on the list.”
Silence.
When Damian spoke again, his voice had gone flat.
“The man from the gala?”
“Yes.”
“I’m coming.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I’m already in the car.”
He was not lying.
He reached Richmond in under two hours.
Camille heard the Moretti vehicles before she saw them. Her mother stood at the front window as two black SUVs stopped a house away and Damian stepped from a gray sedan wearing no tie, his coat open, his expression hard enough to make the neighbor across the street abruptly become interested in closing his blinds.
Laura watched him approach.
“That’s him?”
Camille knew what she meant.
Not Is that Damian Moretti?
Is that the man you love?
“Yes.”
Her mother looked at her.
“You have terrible taste.”
Camille almost laughed.
The doorbell rang.
Damian entered the house as if he were stepping into a church he had no right to disturb.
He greeted Laura with a quiet respect Camille had rarely heard him use with anyone.
“Mrs. Rhodes.”
Laura studied him.
“You look like your father.”
“I’ve been told.”
“He was kinder around the eyes.”
Damian took the insult without blinking.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Camille stared.
Her mother had just called Damian Moretti unkind to his face and survived.
Maybe miracles were real.
They spread Arthur’s letter on the kitchen table.
Damian read it twice.
When he reached the list, the muscles in his face changed.
“You know him,” Camille said.
“I know the name.”
“From where?”
“Cross was his mother’s surname.”
“Whose mother?”
Damian looked up.
“Salvatore’s son.”
The room went silent.
Camille felt cold spread through her hands.
“Julian is your cousin?”
“Half cousin.”
“You danced with him,” Laura said.
Camille gave her mother a look.
“This is not the important part.”
“It feels important.”
Damian almost smiled.
Camille saw it and became annoyed that she still noticed.
“Why didn’t you recognize him?” she asked.
“I hadn’t seen him since he was seventeen. Salvatore never publicly acknowledged him. His mother took him to Boston after a family dispute.”
“He’s a corporate attorney now.”
“Which is useful if your father needs clean signatures and shell companies.”
Damian reached for his phone.
Camille stopped him.
“Wait.”
He looked at her hand on his wrist.
She removed it quickly.
“If Julian is involved, he approached me on purpose.”
“Yes.”
“He wanted something.”
“The earrings.”
“Then why not take them when we danced?”
Damian’s face hardened at the memory of Julian touching her.
Camille saw it.
“Really?”
“What?”
“You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Being jealous during a murder investigation.”
“I can multitask.”
Laura turned away, shoulders shaking suspiciously.
Camille stared at him.
Then despite herself, she laughed.
It was brief and exhausted and completely wrong for the situation.
But it broke something open between them.
Damian’s expression softened.
For a second, neither of them looked away.
Then his phone buzzed.
Reality returned.
Nico’s message contained a photograph from the Blackstone Grand security feed.
At 10:14 p.m., while the ballroom was being evacuated, Julian Cross had bent near the dance floor.
At 10:15, he had put something silver into his pocket.
Camille felt sick.
“He has the other earring.”
“Yes.”
“What if the second card has different evidence?”
“Then he will try to access it.”
“Can he?”
“If Arthur used the same encryption, maybe.”
Camille looked at her father’s letter again.
At the bottom, beneath the list of names, one final sentence had been written in smaller script.
THE KEY OPENS BOX 317. UNION TRUST. ASK FOR THE OLD VAULT.
Damian saw it too.
“We go now.”
Laura stood.
“No.”
They both looked at her.
She pointed at Camille.
“My daughter has been shot at twice, lied to for eleven years, and dragged into whatever generational male stupidity your families created. She eats first.”
Damian blinked.
Camille pressed her lips together.
Twenty minutes later, the most feared man in Baltimore sat at Laura Rhodes’s kitchen table eating chicken soup while two armed guards waited outside.
It was the first time Camille had seen him obey anyone without argument.
She would remember it for the rest of her life.
While Laura cleared the bowls, Damian remained at the table.
Camille went upstairs to change out of the clothes she had slept in. When she returned, she stopped halfway down the staircase.
Her mother and Damian were alone in the kitchen.
Laura stood with one hand on the back of a chair.
“You loved your father?” she asked him.
Damian’s answer came after a pause. “Yes.”
“Even knowing what he was?”
“Yes.”
“Then you understand something my daughter will need time to understand.”
Damian looked at her.
“Love does not make the truth smaller,” Laura said. “Sometimes it makes the truth harder to carry.”
Camille stayed on the stairs, unseen.
Laura continued. “Arthur made choices I hated. He kept things from me because he thought fear was a burden he could carry alone. He was wrong.”
Damian’s expression became still.
“Camille is not me,” Laura said. “She will not accept being protected through ignorance.”
“I know that now.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Laura studied him. “And do you love her?”
Camille almost missed the next step.
Damian did not answer.
Not immediately.
Laura smiled without amusement. “That silence is an answer.”
“It is complicated.”
“No. The circumstances are complicated. The question is simple.”
Damian looked toward the window. Outside, one of his security men stood near the curb pretending not to scan every passing car.
“I have no right to ask her for anything while she still works for me,” he said.
“That was not my question either.”
A long pause.
Finally Damian said, “Yes.”
Camille’s hand tightened around the banister.
The word was so quiet it should not have reached her.
It did.
Laura nodded. “Then when this is over, decide whether you love her enough to stop deciding for her.”
Camille stepped backward before either of them noticed her.
She waited a full minute before making noise on the stairs.
When she entered the kitchen, Damian looked exactly as he always did.
Unreadable.
Only now she knew there was an answer behind the silence.
She said nothing about what she had heard.
Not yet.
They had a bank vault to open and a dead man’s truth waiting inside.
Union Trust had closed its old vault to the public years earlier, but money and Damian Moretti still opened certain doors.
By four that afternoon, they were standing in a basement beneath a historic bank building while an elderly manager rolled out a steel box marked 317.
The key fit.
Inside was no money.
There was a black notebook.
A photograph.
And a small cassette tape.
The photograph showed Arthur Rhodes, Vittorio Moretti, and a much younger Vivian Blackstone standing outside a children’s hospital construction site.
On the back Arthur had written:
THEY STARTED IT FOR CHILDREN. SALVATORE TURNED IT INTO A BANK FOR BLOOD.
The notebook contained dates and account numbers.
The tape was labeled V.B. — APRIL 12.
Damian arranged for an old cassette player.
Arthur’s voice came first.
“Say it again.”
Then Vivian Blackstone.
“I knew the invoices were false.”
Camille closed her eyes.
Vivian continued.
“Salvatore said the money would be replaced before the audit. Then he showed me photographs of my grandson leaving school.”
Arthur asked, “And Lucien?”
“He handles the shipments. The guns come in beneath medical equipment. Vittorio doesn’t know the full scale.”
The tape hissed.
Then another voice entered.
Young. Male.
“Dad says Rhodes is becoming a problem.”
Damian looked at Camille.
Julian.
Even eleven years younger, the voice was unmistakable.
The recording ended with Vivian saying, “If Arthur disappears, no one must ask questions.”
Camille stood motionless.
Damian reached for the notebook.
His phone rang again.
This time it was Salvatore.
Damian put it on speaker.
“Uncle.”
Salvatore’s voice was warm.
“Damian. I hear you’ve been digging through family history.”
“Funny. I hear you’ve been shooting at my secretary.”
A chuckle.
“Secretary? Is that still what we’re calling her?”
Damian’s eyes turned lethal.
Camille touched his arm once.
Stay focused.
Salvatore continued.
“I would like what Arthur left behind.”
“You can ask him yourself.”
“That temper. Your father never taught you diplomacy.”
“My father taught me not to steal from children.”
Silence.
Then Salvatore’s voice lost its humor.
“Give me the card and the bank box, and Mrs. Rhodes grows old peacefully.”
Camille went rigid.
Damian’s head snapped toward her.
Laura.
He muted the call and dialed Nico on another phone.
No answer.
Then his screen lit with an incoming photograph.
Laura Rhodes’s kitchen.
An overturned chair.
Broken glass.
May you like
And on the table, written in spilled tea with one finger, two words.
BLUE WEATHER.
