The Brother Who Did Not Exist
Chapter 06 - The Brother Who Did Not Exist
The knock came again.
Three gentle taps. Patient. Civilized. Terrifying.
Nobody knocked like that in my building unless they wanted you to underestimate them.
Marco raised one finger to his lips. Aleandro moved me behind him without touching me this time, which told me he was learning. Or trying.
A man spoke through the door.
“Miss Wells, we only need the book. No one has to suffer for old loyalties.”
My father’s photograph lay on the table between us.
He saved the wrong Raldi son.
Aleandro’s gaze remained fixed on the door, but I could feel the question in him like heat from a closed oven.
“You said you had no brother,” I whispered.
“I don’t.”
The man outside sighed. “Aleandro, your father lied better than most men prayed.”
Marco looked at his boss.
Aleandro’s expression gave nothing away.
“Name yourself,” he called.
“Vincenzo Bellamo sends his regards.”
Marco’s jaw flexed. “Bellamo’s men.”
That name had weight in the room. I did not know the history, but I knew enough now to understand that men like Aleandro had enemies with surnames, territories, and grudges old enough to inherit.
Aleandro took the ledger from the table and slid it into the inside pocket of his coat.
“We leave by the fire escape.”
The doorknob turned once.
Locked.
Then something metallic scraped against it.
I grabbed the blue backpack, the photographs, and the envelopes because grief makes strange choices under pressure. Marco opened the kitchen window. Cold rain struck my face as he climbed out first, then reached back for me.
“I can do it,” I said.
“This is not about pride,” he replied.
“No. It’s about not dropping my dead mother’s secrets into an alley.”
He almost smiled. “Then hold tight.”
We descended two floors in the rain while Aleandro followed above us. The door to my apartment gave way just as my feet hit the landing outside the second floor. A shout came from inside. Then another.
Aleandro looked down.
“Go.”
The alley smelled of garbage and wet brick. Marco shoved the gate open, and we spilled onto the street where another black SUV rolled to the curb as if summoned by weather.
Shots cracked behind us.
Not wild. Not movie loud. Sharp, controlled pops that made everyone on the sidewalk duck and pretend they had not seen a thing.
Aleandro pushed me into the SUV and climbed in after me. Marco got in front, barking an address into the phone.
My hands shook so hard the photographs slid across my lap.
One landed faceup.
It showed my father, my mother, and a woman I had never seen. She stood slightly apart from them, dark-haired and unsmiling, one hand resting over a swollen belly.
Aleandro reached for the photo, then stopped as if the image might burn him.
“Who is she?” I asked.
“My father’s mistress,” he said.
“You know her?”
“I know the rumor of her. Sofia Bellamo.”
Bellamo.
The name settled between us.
“Your enemy’s family?”
“My father took her from Vincenzo Bellamo’s older brother. Then she disappeared before giving birth.”
I looked again at the photograph. My mother’s arm was linked through Sofia’s, protective and intimate.
“My mother knew her.”
Aleandro’s face was pale beneath his olive skin.
“If that child lived, my father had another son.”
“And if your father lied?”
“Then every man who pledged loyalty to me did so without knowing there was another blood heir.”
I understood then why the ledger mattered. It was not only names and crimes. It was proof of lineage, betrayal, and money. In Aleandro’s world, blood could be more dangerous than bullets.
My phone rang.
Unknown number again.
Aleandro shook his head once.
I answered anyway.
Maybe that was foolish. Maybe I was tired of men deciding what I could survive.
Ryan’s voice came through.
“You found the trunk.”
I closed my eyes.
“You used me.”
“I loved you as much as I could afford to.”
“That is a horrible sentence.”
“I’m trying to keep you alive.”
“By framing me for theft?”
“By making you valuable enough that Bellamo wouldn’t kill you before you led him to the ledger.”
A small, stunned laugh left me.
“You’re insane.”
“I’m indebted,” he said. “There’s a difference.”
Aleandro took the phone from my hand.
“Cole.”
Ryan went silent.
Aleandro’s voice turned soft. “If you contact her again, debt will be the least painful thing in your life.”
Ryan laughed, but it shook.
“You still don’t get it. Bellamo doesn’t only want the book. He wants the nurse because her father hid the heir.”
My heart stopped.
Aleandro went very still.
“What heir?”
Ryan’s answer came barely above a whisper.
“The one Amanda has met every day for three years and never recognized.”
The line went dead.
Marco looked back from the front seat.
Aleandro’s eyes found mine.
The SUV smelled of leather and rainwater, but beneath it clung the sharp metallic scent of fear. I had spent so long managing fear alone that sharing it felt almost indecent. Aleandro stared at the photograph as if it had reached across time and put a hand around his throat. Marco watched the street behind us, but even he kept glancing at the image in my lap.
I wondered how many families were held together by edited stories. A missing brother became no brother. A murdered father became an accident. A terrified mother became secretive, then difficult, then dead before her daughter knew enough to forgive her.
The city passed outside in wet streaks of yellow and red, indifferent to every old sin being resurrected in the back seat.
I kept replaying the message in my head. The nurse still has what his father died looking for. Not Amanda. The nurse. As if my profession were the most important thing about me, or perhaps the only thing they had ever noticed. Nurses pass unnoticed through locked doors. Nurses hear last words. Nurses know which families lie, which men hover too closely, which bruises do not match the explanation.
May you like
Maybe that was why my mother had let me become one despite knowing secrets followed bloodlines. Maybe she thought nursing would make me useful enough to survive. Or maybe I was assigning strategy to a dead woman because grief prefers patterns to chaos.
And all I could think was that if Ryan was telling the truth, someone close to me had been wearing a stranger’s face for years.
