Chapter 13 A Sister's Apartment
POV: Elena Caruso
The body on Gideon Blackwell’s yacht belonged to a son no one knew existed.
Daniel found the truth in a sealed adoption file: Michael Reed, born to Gideon and a woman who disappeared two months after his birth.
Michael had been twenty-nine when he died.
Gideon had used his unacknowledged child as a corpse.
I thought of Sofia wearing my dress.
The pattern was no longer subtle.
Our families didn’t bury their children.
They repurposed them.
“Does Sebastian know where Alexander is?” I asked Daniel.
We sat in the back of an armoured vehicle heading toward Sofia’s apartment. Sebastian was in another car, arguing with lawyers about the grave photograph and the government’s attempt to freeze Caruso assets.
“No.”
“Does he believe Alexander is alive?”
“He believes hope is dangerous.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
Daniel glanced at me.
“Yes.”
The answer explained the grief Sebastian hid whenever Luca entered the room.
“How long have you worked for him?”
“Nine years.”
“Before Gideon died.”
“Before Gideon was reported dead.”
“Did you know Alexander?”
“He was kinder than either his father or brother.”
“Sebastian is kind.”
Daniel’s eyebrow lifted.
“In his terrifying, invasive way,” I added.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were thinking loudly.”
The vehicle stopped outside a modest apartment building three suburbs from my old home.
Sofia had rented the top-floor unit under the name Elena Caruso.
My name appeared beside the buzzer.
Seeing it there made me feel as though I had arrived at the home of the woman I might have become.
Sebastian joined us on the pavement.
His eyes moved over me, checking for injuries from the twenty minutes we had been separated.
I noticed.
He noticed me noticing.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“I didn’t ask.”
“Your face did.”
“My face is considering the structural integrity of the building.”
Daniel walked inside before we could involve him.
The apartment door had three locks and no signs of forced entry.
Inside, my life waited.
Photographs of me covered the hallway.
Not surveillance images.
Copies of childhood portraits from the Caruso estate.
Me on a white pony at eight.
Me holding Luca’s hand on the first day of school.
Me beside my mother at a winter gala.
Sofia had arranged them chronologically, leaving spaces where her own life should have been.
The sitting room contained furniture identical to pieces from my childhood home.
My favourite books stood on the shelves.
A bottle of my mother’s perfume rested on the mantel.
“She lived as me,” I whispered.
Sebastian stayed close without touching.
“Someone trained her.”
In the bedroom, dresses hung in my size. Half were copies of clothes I had owned before my death. The others imitated Mara Lane’s careful wardrobe.
Sofia had known both versions of me.
On her bedside table was a photograph of Sebastian leaving his office.
I picked it up.
“She watched you too.”
His expression remained unreadable.
“Or someone wanted her to.”
The bathroom cabinet held prescription painkillers, surgical creams and photographs documenting Sofia’s procedures.
In the earliest, she didn’t look much like me.
Her face was softer. Her nose slightly wider. Her mouth entirely our mother’s.
With every operation, another part of Sofia disappeared.
I sat on the edge of the bathtub.
“She knew I was alive.”
“Likely.”
“Why didn’t she contact me?”
“Fear. Orders. Shame.”
“You sound certain.”
“I understand what it is to resemble the person your father wanted you to become.”
I looked up.
Sebastian stood in the doorway, too broad for the small room, his eyes on Sofia’s altered face.
“Did Gideon compare you to Alexander?”
“Constantly.”
“Who was better?”
“Whichever son wasn’t standing in front of him.”
I reached for his hand.
Surprise crossed his face.
He let me take it.
For several seconds, we sat with the ghosts of siblings neither of us had been permitted to know.
I released his hand and moved into the kitchen.
The refrigerator held almost no food, but its door was covered with notes.
My work schedule.
The name of my dentist.
The café where Sophie and I ate lunch on Fridays.
Sofia had drawn a line through each item after copying it into a small black diary.
I opened the most recent page.
Mara wears cream when she wants no one to notice her. Elena wore red when she wanted everyone to look. Which one is real?
Below it, she had written:
I think both. I wonder whether she knows.
My throat tightened.
There was no hatred in the words.
Only curiosity.
On the next page, Sofia had begun a letter.
Dear Elena,
I have practised your signature so often that sometimes I write your name when I mean mine. They say I was born first, but you were allowed to keep our mother. I wanted to hate you for that. Then I watched you give your coat to a woman sleeping outside the station and realised you did not know I existed.
The letter ended halfway down the page.
I searched the drawers and found nine more, none finished.
In one, Sofia apologised for opening accounts under my name.
In another, she warned me not to trust a woman in red.
The last contained only a sentence.
If I ever meet you, please say my name before they take it too.
I pressed the page to my chest.
“Sofia,” I whispered.
Sebastian stood behind me.
His hands settled lightly on my shoulders.
This time, I let them remain.
“We’ll give her name back,” he said.
I looked at the room built from stolen pieces of my life.
“First we find who took it.”
Daniel called from the next room.
“You need to see this.”
Behind a removable wardrobe panel, he had found a second room.
A map covered one wall.
Five photographs were pinned across it.
Victor Hale.
Julian Cross, director of the Caruso cemetery.
Dr Helena Ward, whose name I remembered from Luca’s death certificate.
Father Gabriel Moretti, my mother’s distant cousin.
Sebastian.
Victor’s photograph had been crossed out in red.
The other four remained untouched.
“One down,” I said.
“Four to go,” Sebastian finished.
I looked at his photograph.
“You’re the final target.”
“Apparently.”
“Why these people?”
Daniel examined the handwritten dates beneath each face.
“All five were connected to a funeral or death record.”
An audio recorder sat on a desk beneath the map.
Beside it stood a chipped blue mug filled with dried pens. A grocery list had been fixed to the wall with a magnet shaped like Florence. Milk. Soap. Strawberries. The handwriting slanted sharply to the right.
Sofia had bought strawberries while mapping murders.
I touched the list and imagined her making a home inside the life stolen from me. I had wanted to hate her for wearing my face. The apartment made hatred difficult. There were two blankets folded on the sofa, one red and one grey. A paperback lay open facedown near the lamp, its spine broken. Celeste’s black hair ribbon rested around Sofia’s wrist in a photograph tucked behind the map.
“She lived here,” I said.
Sebastian understood what I meant. “Yes.”
Not an impostor. Not a corpse. A woman who forgot to buy coffee and loved someone dangerous and left evidence because she expected to die.
I put the grocery list in an evidence sleeve myself. If anyone wrote Sofia’s story, I wanted them to know she had been more than the face in my coffin.
I pressed play.
Static.
Then Sofia’s voice.
“My name is Sofia Moretti.”
She sounded frightened.
“If you found this, I failed. Victor was the first because he saw Matteo’s men enter the Caruso estate. Julian opened Elena’s grave. Helena created the bodies. Father Gabriel hid Isabella.”
A pause.
“Sebastian buried her.”
His hand tightened around mine.
Sofia continued.
“They will kill every witness before the trust opens. I tried to stop them. Celeste knows I did.”
Another pause.
Her breathing became unsteady.
“I loved her. God help me, I loved her. But Celeste Voss will kill me if I fail.”
The recording ended.
At that exact moment, the apartment door opened.
High heels crossed the floor.
A woman in a red coat appeared at the end of the hallway.
Celeste Voss looked at the recorder in my hand.
Then she raised a gun.
“Sofia always did talk too much.”
