Game of truths.2 (chapt.15)

Alessia's POV.

The moment I swung my door open, the weight of the day descended upon my shoulders like a shattering sky. I let the door close behind me, leaning on it for an extra fraction of a moment. The silence in the room was suffocating, a echo of the chaos whirling inside my mind.

I kicked my heels to the side and walked towards the bathroom, discarding the day like cast-off skin. The shower pounded me, steam curling upwards, but nothing could rinse away what clung to my mind. Not today. Not when the past would not remain still.

I dried off and wrapped myself in a robe and headed straight to the living room. The warm light of the table lamp cast golden shadows on the mahogany desk, where I had laid out the evidence—photos, logs, call records, handwritten notes from the secret room, and that damned photo of Matteo. I didn't even know if that was his real name anymore.

I took the photo of him once more—the one where he was out of focus in the back of a family reunion I never recalled. My hands trembled. Why was he there? Had he been there longer than I had known? Watching? Pretending?

My eyes scanned over to the PI printouts—still photos from airport surveillance, manifests indicating Matteo never got on the ill-fated flight, and the receipt from a high-end resort with the very date Elena passed away. Six months before that. My gut roiled.

I paced the apartment, panting and shoeless, my phone still clutched in my hand. The layout was there, the pieces trying to signify something coherent, something ghastly. But no sooner did I believe I had it than another corner would unravel the thread.

I had known men like Nikolai. Rich, merciless, and clever enough to warp reality like clay. If he was behind Elena's vanishing—and murder—and Matteo's vanishing, then pinning it on him would not be simple. I could no longer rely on rumor or old records. I needed hard evidence, the kind that survived even his kind of destruction.

The kind which even if he becomes black and turns to white, I will still be able to pin him down.

And then there was the boy.

I sat down at my desk and reopened the photo of the boy on my phone. My heart tightened as I looked at his face—those black eyes that looked so much like Matteo's it was painful to breathe. How could I not have noticed this? How could no one have told me?

I zoomed in reflexively, my fingers bunching up the screen. And then I noticed it.

My breath caught.

On the boy's thin wrist, concealed beneath his shirt sleeve, was a bracelet. A simple, delicate chain with a gold heart-shaped pendant. I moved in closer, my heart thudding in my ears.

I knew that bracelet.

I knew it—around my mother's neck. Once, I had seen her wear it. A gift, she had told me. Special, something precious. And handed down to her. We were children. She had worn it then, the same sad look always in her eyes. But since then, no. I'd never seen it around her neck in all those years.

I'd thought she'd lost it!!!

My vision fogged.

Where was it, on this child?

No—not no, could not be—

Unless—

Unless the boy didn't just mean Matteo's son. Unless he meant Elena's.

He was their son!

The thought grasped at me with a vise, twisting my stomach and working a shiver into my spine. All that I knew, all that I believed about my family, began to disintegrate like ash.

Elena.

My sister got pregnant with my ex and I never even found out!

It made sense in a terrifying way. The secrecy. Her precipitous marriage to Nikolai. Her disappearance hours before she died. The strange intimacy she had with Matteo—the looks, the silences, the fact that her eyes always lingered a fraction too long whenever his name came up.

Had she been concealing something?

Someone?

And if my mother was aware. if she was complicit in keeping it a secret from me.

I sprang out of my chair, the room spinning a little as anger boiled up beneath my skin. My own mother. The woman who watched me grieve for a man who wasn't dead. Who stood beside me at my sister's funeral. Who let me drown in heartbreak, when all along… she may have known.

I clutched my phone in shaking fingers and dialed. It rang once before she answered.

"Alessia?" I spoke softly, shocked.

I didn't hesitate.

"We need to talk," I told her, my tone even but lined with steel.

There was silence—a heartbeat too many.

"Of course," she said warily. "Is everything all right?"

I gazed down at the boy's photo, his wrist so tiny, glinting with the same charm that now seemed a curse.

"No," I whispered. "But I think you already know that."

What are you saying dear?"

Mother inquired, doubtfulness etched in her tone.

"You know what I am saying, grandma." I replied, stressing the 'grandma' part.

"How did you-