Chapter 9 Wearing My Name
POV: Elena Caruso
By sunrise, the world had watched me return from the dead seventeen million times.
My face covered every screen in Sebastian’s house.
DEAD HEIRESS ALIVE.
ELENA CARUSO RETURNS AFTER SIX YEARS.
BLACKWELL ENGAGED TO FORMER CRIME PRINCESS.
That final headline made me throw the remote.
It struck the television hard enough to crack the corner of the screen.
Sebastian entered the sitting room carrying two cups of coffee.
His gaze moved from the remote on the floor to the damaged television.
“Feeling better?”
“Immensely.”
He handed me a cup.
“Daniel says the video is already being mirrored. Breaking televisions won’t remove it.”
“Buy the internet.”
“I considered it.”
“And?”
“Too many shareholders.”
I took the coffee.
The ring on my finger caught the morning light.
Large diamond.
Old setting.
Heavy enough to remind me of its presence every time I moved.
“You knew my ring size.”
Sebastian sat opposite me.
“Good morning to you too.”
“How?”
“Employment medical.”
“My employment medical recorded my ring size?”
“No.”
I waited.
He drank his coffee.
“Sebastian.”
“You left a ring beside the sink in the executive bathroom two years ago.”
“And you measured it?”
“I returned it.”
“After measuring it.”
“Apparently.”
“That isn’t normal.”
“Very little about us is.”
I hated the tiny warmth that moved through me when he said us.
“This engagement has rules.”
“You drafted twelve of them in the car.”
“I’ve added another.”
“No measuring my jewellery?”
“No making life-changing announcements without my agreement.”
“You agreed.”
“With twenty reporters and a corrupt commissioner watching.”
“You could have said no.”
“And watched Vale put me into a car?”
His expression changed.
“I would not have allowed that.”
“Exactly. You created a choice between your protection and his custody. That isn’t freedom.”
Sebastian placed his cup down.
“You’re right.”
The answer ruined the argument I had prepared.
“I am?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not going to explain why you had no other option?”
“I had other options. I chose the one that kept you visible, legally represented and close enough for me to protect.”
“There.”
“What?”
“Close enough for you.”
He held my gaze.
“That part was selfish.”
Honesty looked disturbingly good on him.
Before I could answer, Daniel entered.
His shirt was wrinkled, his eyes shadowed and his expression grim.
“Luca is stable.”
I stood.
“Can I see him?”
“The doctor sedated him. Two gunshot wounds, neither critical. Several cracked ribs.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“Only that the woman in the chapel was your mother.”
“My mother is dead,” I said.
Sebastian watched me carefully.
The certainty in my voice felt borrowed.
Daniel handed me a tablet.
“We have Sofia’s preliminary autopsy.”
The first photograph showed her face before death.
Without blood and shadows, the resemblance was more obvious.
Not identical.
Related.
My stomach twisted.
“Cause?”
“A combination of the same rare toxin found in trace amounts on the clothing Isabella wore when Sebastian found her and a stab wound inflicted after paralysis.”
Sebastian swore softly.
“So the same person killed them?” I asked.
“Possibly. The toxin creates respiratory weakness while leaving the victim conscious.”
I imagined Sofia unable to move while someone dressed her in my clothes.
“Keep going.”
Daniel hesitated.
“Sofia had undergone several cosmetic procedures.”
He swiped through medical scans.
Her nose.
Jaw.
Hairline.
Tiny alterations designed to bring her face closer to mine.
“They made her look like me.”
“Over a period of years,” Daniel said.
“Why?”
Sebastian answered.
“To create a living Elena.”
The room became too small.
Daniel opened a file of passport entries, bank transfers and property records.
“Someone has been using Elena Caruso’s identity since three months after your funeral.”
I stared at my name.
Hotel rooms in Switzerland.
A bank account in Singapore.
A private flight to Bellavere.
My signature appeared beneath all of it.
Close enough to fool a stranger.
Wrong enough to feel like an insult.
“Sofia was wearing my life while I was pretending not to have one.”
Sebastian moved beside me.
“We don’t know whether she chose it.”
“Look at her face. Does that look like a choice?”
His hand hovered near my back but didn’t touch.
He was learning.
That frightened me too.
Daniel swiped to the photograph of the black dress.
“We found something stitched into the lining.”
A transparent evidence sleeve held a narrow strip of fabric with numbers written in faded ink.
“Coordinates,” he said.
I recognised the area before he enlarged the map.
The Caruso family cemetery.
My cemetery.
A second item appeared.
A note written on thin paper.
I knew the handwriting.
The letters leaned slightly right. The capital T curved like the handle of an umbrella.
My mother’s hand.
Leni, the truth is sleeping where you should be.
My coffee slipped from my fingers.
Sebastian caught the cup before it hit the rug.
I stared at him.
“My grave.”
He set the cup down.
“Elena.”
“You buried her in my grave.”
Daniel went still.
Sebastian’s silence was an admission.
I crossed the space between us and struck his chest with both palms.
“You put my mother in my coffin?”
“She asked me to hide her where Matteo’s people would never search.”
“You said you didn’t know who was hunting her.”
“I didn’t. She did.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me there was a body under my name?”
“You were still being watched. Visiting the grave would have led them to you.”
“I had a right to know.”
“Yes.”
“Stop agreeing with me!”
He caught my wrists when I hit him again.
“Would you prefer I lie?”
“I would prefer you go back six years and stop treating my life like one of your companies.”
His grip loosened.
Pain crossed his expression.
Good.
I wanted him to feel something.
I wanted someone else to hurt as much as I did.
Then his hands opened and released me.
“The cemetery is monitored,” he said. “The moment we request an exhumation, Matteo will know.”
“Then we don’t request one.”
“Vale will have officers watching it.”
“Your family built half the private tunnels beneath that cemetery.”
His eyebrows rose.
I remembered running through them with Luca as a child, daring each other to touch the oldest coffins.
“There’s an entrance beneath the western mausoleum,” I said. “It opens behind the Caruso crypt.”
“You’re certain?”
“I hid there when my father tried to make me attend etiquette lessons.”
“Your childhood was alarming.”
“You wanted to marry into it.”
“I was young.”
“You were twenty-four.”
“Practically an infant.”
I almost smiled.
The fact that he could still do that to me felt unfair.
Daniel cleared his throat.
“If you two have finished discussing Mr Blackwell’s lost innocence, I can arrange excavation equipment.”
Sebastian gave him a look.
Daniel’s face remained admirably neutral.
I took the note from his hand.
My mother had written to me.
Not Mara.
Leni.
The daughter she had watched but never touched.
“Tonight,” I said.
Sebastian shook his head.
“We need to assess—”
“Tonight.”
“Elena.”
“My sister is in your morgue. My brother is unconscious upstairs. My mother has spent four years beneath a stone carrying my name.”
I removed the diamond ring and pressed it into his palm.
His fingers closed reflexively.
“If this engagement means I’m protected by the Blackwell name, use it. If it means I’m your equal, prove it.”
His gaze dropped to the ring.
Then he took my left hand and slid it back onto my finger.
“Tonight,” he said.
Hours later, beneath a moonless sky, Sebastian, Daniel and I stood before the marble angel marking my grave.
My own name was carved into the stone.
ELENA ISABELLA CARUSO
BELOVED DAUGHTER
1998–2020
I traced the lie with one finger.
The letters were cold enough to hurt. For six years, strangers had been able to come here and believe they were standing above everything I had once been. Somewhere in the city, Mara Hale had paid rent, missed trains and learned which supermarket marked bread down after eight. Here, Elena Caruso had remained permanently twenty-two, loved in marble because she had been impossible to love safely in life.
Sebastian came no closer. It was the first mercy he offered that night: he let me stand alone with the woman I had killed in order to survive.
“If there is a body inside,” I said, “I choose when the coffin opens.”
“Yes.”
“And no one photographs her.”
Daniel glanced toward the perimeter. “We have signal jammers and a sealed forensic tent ready.”
I looked at Sebastian. “You planned for me to agree.”
“I planned for every answer you might give.”
That should have frightened me. Instead, beneath the moon and the name I no longer knew how to wear, it steadied something loose inside me.
Sebastian waited behind me.
“Open it,” I said.
