Chapter 15 The Housekeeper's Son
POV: Elena Caruso
The Reyes cottage was burning when we arrived.
Flames climbed the back wall, turning the windows orange. A gunshot cracked from inside.
Sebastian caught my arm.
“Wait for the team.”
I pulled free and ran toward the house.
“Elena!”
He followed.
The front door had been kicked inward. Smoke rolled across the ceiling, thick enough to hide the stairs.
“Marco!”
Something crashed in the kitchen.
A man in a black mask appeared through the smoke and raised his gun.
Sebastian shoved me behind the wall.
I grabbed the ceramic lamp beside the door and threw it.
The base struck the attacker’s wrist. His shot went into the ceiling.
Sebastian hit him hard enough to drive both men into the dining table.
I took the fallen gun.
The attacker kicked Sebastian away and reached beneath his jacket.
I aimed.
“Don’t.”
He looked at me.
I fired into the floor beside his foot.
He froze.
Sebastian disarmed him, twisted his arms behind his back and secured them with a plastic tie.
“You fired inside a burning house,” he said.
“You’re welcome.”
“The bullet could have ricocheted.”
“You can critique my technique after we find Marco.”
A weak voice came from the kitchen.
“Elena?”
I found Marco beside the pantry, pressing a towel to his shoulder.
He was no longer the skinny nine-year-old who had cried into my black funeral dress. He had become a tall man with his mother’s gentle brown eyes and a face grey from blood loss.
Teresa lay behind him.
For one terrible moment, I thought she was dead.
Then she coughed.
“They shot my mother,” Marco said.
I knelt and checked the wound in Teresa’s side.
“Sebastian!”
He was beside me instantly.
“Ambulance is two minutes away.”
“Police?”
“My medical team.”
“Good.”
The masked man began laughing in the other room.
“She’ll die before they arrive.”
I stood.
Sebastian caught my hand.
“He wants you angry.”
“He has excellent instincts.”
“Stay with Teresa.”
He returned to the attacker.
His voice was quiet.
“Who sent you?”
“Go to hell.”
Sebastian glanced toward the flames spreading across the ceiling.
“You first.”
He hauled the man upright and dragged him toward the kitchen fire.
The attacker struggled.
“Wait.”
Sebastian stopped.
“Name.”
“Vale.”
Commissioner Vale.
I exchanged a look with Sebastian.
“Orders?” he asked.
“Kill the woman. Take the box.”
“What box?”
The attacker’s gaze moved toward Teresa.
She was conscious now.
Barely.
Her fingers clutched a chain around her neck.
Marco saw it.
“Mama?”
Teresa pulled a small brass key free and pressed it into my hand.
“Your mother left it.”
The floor above us groaned.
Sebastian released the attacker only long enough to lift Teresa. Marco tried to stand and nearly collapsed.
I put his good arm over my shoulders.
We escaped through the front door as an upstairs window exploded.
Daniel’s vehicles filled the lane. Paramedics took Teresa and Marco while guards secured the attacker.
Rain struck my face.
I looked back at the burning cottage.
“The box is still inside.”
“No,” Marco said from the ambulance. “Safe beneath the garden angel.”
Sebastian sent two men around the house.
They returned carrying a dented metal box.
The brass key opened it.
Inside was a child’s music box painted with white roses.
I recognised it immediately.
“My mother kept this beside her bed.”
Marco nodded.
“She gave it to Mama a year after your funeral. Told her that if anything happened, it had to reach you.”
“Did you see my mother?”
“Twice.”
I sat beside him on the ambulance step.
“Tell me.”
“She looked different. Blonde hair. Glasses. But she hugged Mama the same way.”
“Did she ask about me?”
“Every time.”
“Why didn’t your mother contact me?”
Marco’s eyes filled with apology.
“Mrs Caruso said it would get you killed.”
Another person had chosen silence on my behalf.
I wanted to be furious.
Teresa was bleeding because she had kept the promise.
Anger felt too simple.
The paramedic stabilised her enough to speak.
Teresa beckoned me close.
“Your mother came the last time wearing a blue scarf,” she whispered. “She sat at my kitchen table all night and watched the road.”
“Was she alone?”
“A man brought her. Young. Fair hair. He waited outside.”
“Alexander,” Sebastian said.
Teresa’s eyes moved to him.
“He called himself Alex. Mrs Caruso said he had lost his name too.”
Sebastian crouched beside the stretcher.
“Did he say where he was going?”
“Prague. A hospital. He said Gideon would kill him if he failed.”
“Failed at what?”
Teresa began coughing.
The paramedic tried to move us back, but she gripped my wrist with surprising strength.
“Your mother said one Blackwell son helped her escape the night she died. Another hunted her. She didn’t know which son Sebastian would become.”
I looked at him.
His face had become unreadable.
“What did she believe?” I asked.
Teresa’s gaze softened.
“She gave him your life.”
The words struck harder than accusation. I followed Teresa’s glance to Sebastian. Blood from Marco’s shoulder marked one of his cuffs, and dust silvered the knees of his trousers from where he had taken cover beside me. He looked nothing like a saviour. He looked exhausted, furious and human.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
Teresa closed her eyes against a fresh wave of pain. “Isabella found him at the east gate after Antonio was shot. He had a car and a route through the service road. She put you in his arms and said, ‘Not the family. Her.’”
Memory surfaced: rain against my face; a man carrying me through smoke; my father’s blood drying between my fingers. I had believed Luca pulled me from the estate. Perhaps because Sebastian had let me believe it.
“You carried me out.”
His jaw tightened. “For part of the way.”
“And then?”
“You woke. You fought me. You demanded I go back for Antonio.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“Was he alive?”
The question held the six years I had spent wondering whether I abandoned my father too soon.
Sebastian did not look away. “He was. Isabella was applying pressure to the wound. Alexander was trying to reach the study from the east corridor. Then the second team came through the windows.”
“Whose team?”
“I didn’t know then.”
“And now?”
“White roses were painted inside their weapons cases.”
Teresa made a frightened sound.
I wanted to shake Sebastian until every withheld memory fell out. Instead, I forced myself to ask, “Why didn’t you take me farther?”
“Because you made me promise to get your mother.”
Of course I had. Even terrified and half conscious, I had tried to bargain with death.
“Did you?”
“I found her two years later.”
His answer carried a cemetery inside it.
Before I could demand details, Teresa’s monitor alarm accelerated. The paramedics shifted around us, cutting the conversation into an unfinished shape. I memorised Sebastian’s face. Later, when the emergency could no longer protect his silence, I would return to every missing year.
Then the paramedic closed the ambulance doors.
“What did Isabella say about Gideon?” Sebastian asked.
Marco looked at him.
“She said the dead Blackwell had three sons. One loyal, one lost and one buried.”
Sebastian’s face tightened.
“Which was I?”
“She didn’t say.”
Daniel brought the captured attacker toward a vehicle.
A tiny red light appeared on his collar.
“Down!” I shouted.
The shot struck the attacker through the throat.
Daniel dragged him behind the engine block as a second bullet shattered the ambulance mirror.
Sebastian covered me with his body.
The shooter fired once more, then vanished into the tree line.
The captured man died without revealing anything else.
On his wrist, beneath his sleeve, someone had tattooed a small white rose.
Marco stared at it.
“My mother drew that symbol.”
“Where?” I asked.
He pointed at the music box.
I turned it over.
Carved into the base was the same rose.
And beneath it, in my mother’s handwriting, were five words.
PLAY THIS WHEN GIDEON RETURNS.
The music box opened by itself.
My mother’s melody began.
On the final note, a hidden compartment clicked open.
Inside was a photograph of Gideon Blackwell standing beside my father.
It had been taken three weeks after Gideon’s funeral.
