134. 🍼 The Ultrasound Hidden Inside the Mafia Boss’s Private Safe

Chapter 06 - The Missing Watch

Mina spent the night in a narrow classroom that still had multiplication tables painted along one wall.

Agnes gave her a cot, a clean blanket, and a pillowcase that smelled faintly of lavender. Alfred stationed men outside, then left the room when Mina asked him to leave. He did not argue. That was new enough to feel suspicious.

Sleep did not come.

Neither did peace.

Every time Mina closed her eyes, she saw the words again.

THE GIRL WAS NEVER THE TARGET.

The baby was.

At three in the morning, she sat up and turned on a small lamp shaped like a lamb. The room glowed weakly around her. On the wall, seven times eight equaled fifty-six in cheerful blue paint, as if numbers could still be innocent.

Her phone had been replaced with one Lev said was clean.

It felt like holding someone else’s life.

There were no messages from Alfred. No orders. No apologies. No explanation for the new distance between them.

That, somehow, kept her awake more than pursuit would have.

At dawn, Agnes opened the door without knocking.

“You’re alive,” she said.

“Barely.”

“Barely counts before breakfast.”

She set down toast, hard-boiled eggs, and tea. Mina looked at the food. Her stomach objected to nearly everything lately, but hunger had become practical rather than emotional.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“Which him? The brooding one, the loyal one, or the maternal war criminal?”

Despite everything, Mina laughed.

Agnes’s face warmed by one degree.

“Alfred went to your apartment.”

Mina’s smile vanished.

“Why?”

“To see what wasn’t stolen.”

Mina understood immediately.

Good accountants did not only study what vanished. They studied what thieves left behind.

By nine, Alfred returned with Mina’s blue sweater folded in one arm and a small cardboard box in the other. He paused at the classroom doorway.

“You asked me not to come in without permission.”

“I meant your penthouse.”

“I’m expanding the policy.”

She should not have found that funny.

She did not laugh.

But something in her chest loosened anyway.

“Come in.”

He entered and placed the sweater on the nearest desk.

“They tore the apartment apart,” he said. “But not like thieves.”

“What were they looking for?”

“This.”

He opened the cardboard box.

Inside was her father’s watch.

Mina stared.

The old silver watch had belonged to Daniel Vale, a man who taught Mina how to count change without mistrusting every customer and how to read account books as if they were diaries. He had died when she was nineteen. Heart attack, her mother said, though Mina had always suspected grief had been kinder than the truth.

“I keep that in a shoebox under winter scarves.”

“I know.”

Her eyes lifted.

Alfred grimaced.

“I learned that today. From your apartment. Not before.”

She looked back at the watch.

“They wanted this?”

“They opened the back.”

Mina reached for it, then stopped.

Alfred understood and removed the watch carefully. He turned it over.

The metal back had been loosened.

Beneath it was a tiny folded piece of film.

Mina frowned.

“What is that?”

“Microfilm.”

“That’s dramatic.”

“Your father apparently had style.”

The sentence should have been absurd. Instead, it brought tears to her eyes so quickly she hated them.

Alfred’s face changed.

He took one step, then stopped himself.

Mina noticed.

“Go ahead,” she said quietly.

He came closer.

Slowly.

When he sat beside her on the child-sized chair, his knees rose awkwardly and the sight was so ridiculous, so painfully human, that she almost cried harder.

“I didn’t know your father,” he said.

“No.”

“But I know Carlo worked in my father’s accounting office twenty years ago. If Daniel Vale hid anything, it may not have started with us. It may have started with them.”

“My father was a bookkeeper for your father’s trucking company for six months,” Mina said. “He quit when I was small. He never said why.”

Alfred looked at the microfilm.

“Maybe he did.”

Lev arranged an old projector through one of Agnes’s retired-priest connections, which Mina decided not to question. By late morning, they stood in the basement with the microfilm projected onto a white sheet pinned to a wall.

Rows of numbers appeared first.

Old payments.

Shell companies.

Names Mina did not know.

Then one she did.

Harbor Vale.

Her breath caught.

Alfred looked sharply at the screen.

“Harbor Vale existed before Carlo’s consulting company.”

Mina stepped closer.

At the bottom of the page was her father’s handwriting.

The baby records are hidden under the charity account. Lucia is not the only one they watched.