🐰 The Stuffed Rabbit and the Mafia Boss’s Secret Ledger

Chapter 10 - The Red House

Sebastian did not go alone.

He was sentimental in certain private corners of his mind, but he was not stupid.

At dawn, three vehicles left the estate by three different roads. The first carried decoys. The second carried Jasper and four men through the mountain route. The third, an old blue pickup owned by Mrs. Alvarez’s nephew, carried Sebastian, Hannah, Nori, and the rabbit beneath a tarp that smelled faintly of hay and motor oil.

Hannah objected to every part of the plan except the part where she refused to be left behind.

“If this is about my husband and my child,” she said, “then you do not get to lock me in a guest room while men decide what happens next.”

Sebastian looked at her across the kitchen table.

“I was going to suggest the library.”

She stared.

He looked down at his coffee.

“That was a joke.”

“It needs work.”

Mrs. Alvarez, listening from the stove, crossed herself and muttered, “He is learning.”

The road toward Aspen narrowed as the morning climbed. Snow hung in the pines. Hannah kept one hand on Nori’s car seat, thumb moving over the buckle again and again. Nori slept with the rabbit on her lap, unaware that adults had begun treating it like a witness.

The Red House appeared just after noon.

It was not red anymore.

Weather had worn the paint to the color of dried blood. It sat above a frozen creek, all narrow windows and old timber, the kind of place wealthy men built when they wanted to pretend wilderness had invited them instead of being purchased.

Sebastian remembered being twelve there. Matteo had been eight, fearless and annoying, always climbing things after being told not to. Their father had taught them to shoot behind the barn. Their mother had refused to visit because she said the house made men worse.

As usual, she had been right.

Inside, dust lay over furniture like a second upholstery. A fireplace blackened the stone wall. On the mantel stood a row of old photographs turned face down.

Hannah lifted one.

Sebastian and Matteo as boys.

Before everything.

A voice came from the stairwell.

“Put it back.”

Hannah froze.

Sebastian stepped in front of her.

Matteo Vale descended slowly.

He was thinner than Sebastian remembered and broader in the shoulders than grief had allowed him to imagine. Burn scars pulled along the left side of his jaw and disappeared beneath his collar. His eyes were the same. That was the cruelty. The dead should have the decency to look different.

“Hello, Seb.”

Sebastian’s voice was quiet. “Matteo.”

Nori woke and rubbed her eyes.

The room shifted when Matteo saw her.

Not because he looked cruel.

Because he looked sad.

“That’s Daniel’s girl,” he said.

Hannah held Nori close. “You knew my husband.”

Matteo’s gaze moved to her. “He tried to save me.”

Sebastian went still.

The sentence did not fit the story Owen had built, or Carlo, or whoever had fed Matteo rage for nine years.

Matteo laughed without humor.