Chapter 14 The Fifth Witness
POV: Sebastian Blackwell
Celeste Voss held the gun like someone who had been taught well and practised rarely.
Her stance was precise.
Her breathing was not.
I moved in front of Elena.
Elena immediately stepped beside me.
Progress was difficult with this woman.
“Put it down, Celeste.”
Her eyes remained on the recorder.
“That belongs to me.”
“It belonged to Sofia,” Elena said.
Pain crossed Celeste’s face.
There and gone.
“You know nothing about her.”
“I know she was my sister.”
“Half sister.”
Elena’s expression sharpened.
“You knew.”
Celeste laughed softly.
“Everyone knew except you.”
I heard Daniel moving in the hidden room behind us.
Celeste heard him too.
The gun swung.
I caught her wrist before she could fire.
The shot struck the ceiling.
Elena drove her shoulder into Celeste’s body while I twisted the weapon away. We went down against the hallway wall in a tangle of red wool and fury.
Daniel took the gun.
Celeste stopped fighting.
“Sofia said you would kill her,” Elena said.
“Sofia said many things when she was frightened.”
“Did you?”
Celeste looked at her.
“If I killed your sister, do you imagine I would walk into her apartment carrying a registered weapon?”
“I imagine arrogant people make stupid decisions.”
Despite the situation, I nearly smiled.
Celeste saw it.
“You always did like difficult women, Sebastian.”
“We have never discussed my preferences.”
“You didn’t need to.”
Elena looked between us.
“How well do you know her?”
“Professionally.”
Celeste’s mouth curved.
“His father intended us to marry.”
The temperature in the hallway dropped.
“Gideon proposed many mergers,” I said.
“You gave me a ring.”
Elena’s gaze moved to the diamond on her own hand.
“A corporate signet,” I said. “Not an engagement ring.”
“It was presented at dinner.”
“With six lawyers.”
“Very romantic.”
Elena folded her arms.
“I’m enjoying this far more than I should.”
Celeste’s smile faded.
“Ask him why the ring on your hand was made for a Voss woman.”
I looked at Elena.
She slowly removed the diamond.
“Was it?”
“The setting belonged to my mother,” I said. “Gideon offered it during negotiations. I refused the arrangement.”
“And kept the ring.”
“It was mine.”
“Not anymore.”
She held it out.
I closed her fingers around it.
“We can argue about jewellery after Celeste explains why she is standing inside a dead woman’s apartment.”
Celeste sat against the wall, her composure returning.
“Sofia called me last night.”
“Sofia was already dead,” Daniel said.
“A scheduled message. She told me where she hid a recording.”
“So you knew she expected to die,” Elena said.
Celeste looked away.
“Sofia had been making dramatic predictions for years.”
“Someone carved her face into mine.”
“That happened before I met her.”
“Who did it?”
Silence.
I crouched in front of Celeste.
“Matteo?”
Her eyes flickered.
Enough.
“You worked for him.”
“Everyone worked for someone.”
“Not me,” Elena said.
Celeste’s gaze moved over her.
“You work for Sebastian.”
“I’m employed by a company he owns. That is not the same thing.”
“You live in his house, wear his ring and allow him to stand in front of you whenever a weapon appears.”
“He does that without permission.”
“And you never seem eager to stop him.”
Elena glanced at me.
“I am becoming more eager by the second.”
Celeste smiled as though she had found a weak point.
“Gideon wanted a Voss daughter beside the Blackwell heir because our banks could clean what his shipping companies moved. Sebastian refused me, but not the arrangement. He has spent his life pretending he can use dirty power cleanly.”
“That is enough,” I said.
“Is it untrue?”
It wasn’t.
That was why I wanted her silent.
Elena studied me.
“Did Blackwell & Co. use Voss banks?”
“Until I took control. I ended the relationship within six months.”
“Why?”
“I found accounts connected to missing children.”
Celeste’s expression sharpened.
“Accounts you never proved belonged to us.”
“Because every witness vanished.”
“Or because your father created them under our name.”
The accusation landed closer to a fear than I cared to admit.
Elena turned back to Celeste.
“You knew Sofia was being made to look like me.”
“Not when it began.”
“But later.”
Celeste’s silence answered.
“You slept beside her,” Elena said softly. “You watched her wake with another woman’s face, and you did nothing.”
Celeste looked away.
For the first time, shame replaced calculation.
“I tried to take her out,” she whispered.
“When?”
“Three nights before she died. She refused to leave without the recording and Isabella’s key.”
“What key?”
“I don’t know. She said it would make the dead speak.”
The engraved disc inside Isabella’s locket.
Celeste knew enough to be dangerous and not enough to be the architect.
I crouched in front of her.
“Did he order Sofia’s death?”
“I don’t know.”
Elena knelt beside me.
“Did you love her?”
Celeste’s face cracked.
Not much.
Enough to reveal the woman beneath the red coat.
“Yes.”
“Then help me find who killed her.”
“If I help you, I’m dead.”
“If you don’t, you’re a suspect in the murder of the woman you claim to love.”
Celeste looked at Elena for a long time.
“Julian Cross called me three hours ago,” she said. “He was frightened. He said someone knew he opened the grave.”
I stood.
“Where is he?”
“At the cemetery office.”
Daniel was already calling.
No answer.
We left Celeste restrained beneath the guard of two men and drove to the cemetery.
Rain began before we arrived.
Julian’s office door stood open.
The lights were off.
I entered first.
The smell of blood met me in the corridor.
Julian sat behind his desk, his head angled unnaturally against the chair.
A red line crossed his throat.
His right hand clutched a white rose.
On the wall behind him, someone had drawn a number in blood.
2
Elena stopped in the doorway.
“Two down.”
I checked Julian’s pulse despite the obvious.
Nothing.
Daniel searched the room.
“No sign of forced entry.”
“He knew the killer,” Elena said.
Her voice was steady, but her hands shook.
I wanted to hold them.
I didn’t.
On Julian’s desk lay a photograph of my funeral.
Not Elena’s.
My father’s.
The body recovered from the yacht had been burned beyond recognition, so Gideon’s coffin had remained closed.
Someone had circled Alexander standing beside me.
There was another figure near the edge of the frame.
A young man stood half concealed behind a stone column. I enlarged the image on Daniel’s scanner.
He had Gideon’s height and my mother’s eyes.
Rebecca’s eyes. I had seen the same expression in photographs taken before my father trained softness out of our family: dark, watchful, almost amused. My mother had once spoken of a baby who lived for eleven minutes. I had never questioned the grave, because children were taught not to question graves in a Blackwell house.
“You knew him?” Elena asked.
“No.” The answer scraped my throat. “I may have been taught to mourn him.”
She moved nearer without touching me. Her presence had become a kind of contact all its own.
Daniel zoomed in on Michael’s hand. A signet ring caught the cemetery light—plain silver, marked with a single black line.
I owned its twin.
Alexander had owned the third.
Our mother had told us the rings came in a set of two. Another lie delivered tenderly enough to resemble love.
Elena looked from the image to my hand. “Your family buried sons before mine started burying daughters.”
“Perhaps that is how the men learned.”
“Then we teach them something else.”
Her certainty was reckless, infuriating and more sustaining than hope.
Michael Reed.
The secret son whose body supposedly burned on the yacht was alive at Gideon’s funeral.
Which meant the corpse had been substituted after the photograph was taken—or Michael had died helping my father vanish.
On the back, Julian had written:
THREE SONS. ONE COFFIN. ASK TERESA WHO LEFT.
Beneath him was a handwritten address.
Elena read it.
“Who lives there?”
I recognised the street but not the number.
Daniel entered it into his database.
The result appeared.
“Teresa Reyes,” he said. “Former housekeeper for the Caruso family.”
Elena went pale.
“Marco’s mother.”
The office phone rang.
Daniel put it on speaker.
A young man breathed hard on the other end.
“Elena?”
She moved closer.
“Marco?”
“They found us.”
Glass shattered behind him.
Then came a gunshot.
