CHAPTER 4 – The Dead Wife's Secret
CHAPTER 4 – The Dead Wife's Secret
The penthouse became eerily quiet after the guests were evacuated.
No music.
No conversation.
Only the sound of armed men searching every room.
Matteo locked himself inside his private office.
An hour later...
He called only one person.
Me.
When I entered, he wasn't sitting behind his desk.
He stood in front of a massive portrait.
A beautiful woman with warm brown eyes smiled from the painting.
She looked almost identical to Leo.
"My wife."
His voice was softer than I had ever heard.
"Sofia."
He didn't look away from the portrait.
"She died in a car accident."
I nodded.
Everyone knew that story.
Or thought they did.
Matteo opened a hidden drawer beneath the painting.
Inside sat dozens of letters.
Photographs.
Medical reports.
One thick envelope.
He handed it to me.
"I've never shown anyone this."
Inside was Sofia's handwritten journal.
The final pages were stained with tears.
One paragraph had been underlined twice.
If anything happens to me, never leave Leo alone with Silvio. He smiles too easily when children cry.
A chill crawled down my spine.
"This..."
I whispered.
"You knew?"
Matteo closed his eyes.
"I thought grief had made her paranoid."
His voice broke for the first time.
"I didn't listen."
He sat heavily in his chair.
"I buried my wife believing she had become frightened after childbirth."
He looked at Leo sleeping on the office sofa.
"I buried the only person who tried to warn me."
Silence filled the room.
Finally he spoke again.
"I failed them both."
A knock interrupted us.
Marco entered quickly.
"Boss."
"We searched Silvio's apartment."
"And?"
Marco placed a small black notebook onto the desk.
"We found this hidden beneath the floor."
Matteo opened it.
Every page contained dates.
Payments.
Medical dosages.
Behavior reports.
Next to Leo's name were chilling notes.
Dose increased.
Violent episode successful.
Public incident effective.
Father losing political support.
I felt sick.
This wasn't abuse.
It was an experiment.
Someone had been carefully engineering Leo's emotional collapse for years.
Then Marco turned another page.
His face changed.
"Boss..."
Matteo looked down.
The final entry read:
Stage Three begins tomorrow.
Child removed permanently.
Replacement guardian approved.
Below that...
Was a photograph.
Not of Leo.
Not of Matteo.
It was me.
Walking Leo through Central Park three days earlier.
Across the photo, someone had written in red ink:
REMOVE HER FIRST.
At that exact moment...
Every light in the penthouse went out.
Darkness swallowed the room.
Then emergency alarms began screaming through the building.
Marco reached for his radio.
Static.
Nothing.
One of the guards shouted from the hallway—
"THE SECURITY SYSTEM HAS BEEN HACKED!"
Another voice screamed from downstairs—
"THEY'RE INSIDE!"
Then came the sound that froze every heart in the penthouse.
May you like
A child's terrified scream.
"EMMA!"
