Chapter 10 - The Second Fire
Emergency lights flickered on.
Red light filled the ballroom.
Smoke began pouring through the floor vents.
Matteo had planned this carefully.
Too carefully.
He had installed something beneath my house without my knowledge.
Valentina screamed.
“The baby.”
I grabbed Nico.
“Stay with me.”
Security teams rushed in.
“Fire suppression isn’t responding.”
My chief shouted.
“Manual sabotage.”
Of course.
Matteo disappeared through the vault passage.
I knew exactly where he was going.
The records.
I handed Nico to a guard.
“Take him outside.”
Nico grabbed my sleeve.
“No.”
“You’re leaving.”
“He’ll destroy everything.”
“I don’t care.”
“I do.”
His words stopped me.
“My whole life is in those papers.”
He was right.
I hated that he was right.
Marco appeared through the side entrance with Elena and Sophia behind two guards.
I swore.
“You were supposed to stay outside.”
Marco held up the metal box.
“He needs this.”
Smoke thickened.
Sophia began coughing.
“Get them out.”
Marco shook his head.
“There’s another way to the vault.”
“How do you know?”
“My mother showed Elena.”
Elena pointed toward the old musicians’ corridor.
“Behind the fireplace.”
We moved quickly.
A hidden staircase took us beneath the ballroom.
The heat increased with every step.
Matteo had poured accelerant through the archive corridor.
Fire climbed the walls.
At the far end, he stood in front of the vault.
The door was open.
He had somehow learned the code.
Then I saw Valentina behind him.
I stared.
She had followed him.
The newborn was no longer in her arms.
One of my guards had the baby safely outside.
Valentina held Matteo’s gun.
Matteo looked at her.
“You won’t shoot me.”
She was crying.
“No.”
“I probably won’t.”
He smiled.
“Give me the gun.”
She tightened her grip.
“You tried to kill our son.”
“I was protecting everything we built.”
“We built nothing.”
Her voice cracked.
“We stole it.”
Matteo’s face hardened.
He moved toward her.
She raised the weapon.
“Stop.”
He kept walking.
I stepped into the corridor.
“Matteo.”
He turned.
For a second, neither of us moved.
Behind him, flames reached the shelves.
“You should leave.”
I said it quietly.
“You still have time.”
Matteo laughed.
“To do what?”
“Spend the rest of my life explaining that I was never really a Rossi?”
“You were my brother.”
His smile disappeared.
“Were.”
“You made that choice.”
“No.”
“You made it the moment you were born first.”
The bitterness in his voice was almost childish.
That was the tragedy.
Matteo had destroyed dozens of lives fighting a competition that existed only inside his head.
Marco entered behind me.
Matteo saw him.
Everything changed.
“You.”
Marco stepped forward.
“My mother was afraid of you.”
“She should have minded her own business.”
“She was your wife.”
“She betrayed me.”
Marco’s face twisted.
“She tried to protect her babies.”
Matteo glanced toward the metal box in Marco’s hands.
“Give me that.”
“No.”
“Marco.”
It was the first time I heard Matteo say his son’s name.
Marco flinched.
“Do not call me that.”
“I’m your father.”
“No.”
Marco looked at me.
“A father doesn’t burn his children.”
Matteo lunged.
Valentina screamed.
The gun fired.
A pipe above us burst.
Flames exploded across the corridor.
Matteo disappeared behind the fire.
Then part of the ceiling collapsed.
Marco shouted.
“He’s trapped.”
I saw Matteo beneath a fallen beam.
He was alive.
The fire surrounded him.
For one second, I remembered twelve years earlier.
Matteo holding me back while my son supposedly burned.
Now I could walk away.
I could let the fire decide.
Nico appeared at the top of the stairs.
“Dad!”
The word hit me harder than the explosion.
Dad.
The first time he had called me that.
I looked at Matteo.
Then at my son.
May you like
And I made my choice.
I walked into the fire.
