Lucia’s Last Letter
Chapter 04 - Lucia’s Last Letter
Evan reached for the envelope.
Vincent caught his wrist before his fingers touched it.
Not roughly. That almost made it worse.
“Don’t,” Vincent said.
Evan stared at him. “She wrote to me?”
Vincent’s silence answered.
The boy in him—because every grown man still carries one—appeared suddenly in his face. Wounded. Confused. Furious.
“You kept my mother’s last letter from me?”
Camilla watched them with the calm attention of someone observing a match she had struck finally reach the curtains.
“I was protecting you,” Vincent said.
“From what? A dead woman’s handwriting?”
“From believing she left you.”
Evan pulled free. “Then give it to me.”
Vincent looked at the envelope. His control had always seemed absolute to me, but now I saw its cost. Control was not the absence of pain. It was pain forced to stand in a suit and answer questions politely.
“She wrote it the morning she died,” he said.
“Then it belongs to me.”
Camilla’s smile thinned. “Finally, something sensible.”
I noticed her left hand then.
A tiny tremor.
Not grief. Not nerves.
Impatience.
She wanted Evan to open the letter immediately.
Which meant we should not.
“Wait,” I said.
Every face turned toward me.
Camilla sighed. “The assistant speaks.”
“The seal is wrong.”
Vincent looked at me sharply.
I stepped closer to the desk. “Lucia’s monogram is pressed straight, but the wax pooled on the left side. Whoever sealed it held the envelope at an angle.”
Evan frowned. “So?”
“So if your mother wrote it while dying, maybe she didn’t care about wax.” I looked at Camilla. “But if someone forged a letter and wanted it opened dramatically in front of a room, they might overlook the small things.”
Camilla’s mouth hardened. “You are absurd.”
“Probably.” I touched the envelope without opening it. “But paper yellows differently at the folded edge. This looks old on the outside and newer where it was handled.”
Vincent’s eyes narrowed.
Evan looked between us. “Can someone just open it?”
“No,” Vincent said.
For the first time that night, he and I agreed before speaking to each other.
Camilla’s expression changed. The tremor vanished.
“Vincent, don’t be ridiculous.”
He picked up the envelope. “Marco.”
Marco appeared in the doorway.
“Take this to Dr. Bell. Ink, paper, seal, fingerprints. Quietly.”
Camilla laughed, but the sound had lost its ease. “Your son deserves answers tonight.”
“He will get them,” Vincent said. “The true ones.”
Evan’s anger shifted direction, but not away from his father entirely. “You still kept the real letter.”
Vincent’s jaw tightened. “Yes.”
“Why?”
The question opened something in him.
“She wrote three letters that morning,” Vincent said. “One to me. One to you. One to the man Camilla wants you to believe was her lover.”
Camilla went very still.
I looked at Vincent.
He continued, “Lucia was not running away with him. She was trying to warn him.”
“Warn him about what?” Evan asked.
Vincent looked at his sister.
Camilla took one careful breath.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
Vincent’s voice dropped. “About the person selling harbor routes to the Vitellis.”
The name cracked through the room.
The Vitellis were why I had been writing letters until midnight for the past month. They were old rivals, newly polite, and dangerous in the way winter ice looked smooth before breaking underfoot.
Evan stared at his aunt. “What does that have to do with Mom?”
Camilla’s lips parted.
Before she could answer, a gunshot sounded outside the study.
Not inside.
Not near us.
But close enough to make the chandelier in the hallway tremble.
The ballroom erupted.
Marco shoved Evan behind him. Vincent grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the door.
Then a security man burst in, pale beneath his earpiece.
“Mr. Marlowe,” he said, breathless, “the Vitellis are here.”
May you like
Vincent looked at Camilla.
And she smiled as if this, too, had been on the schedule.
