Chapter 10 - DELIVERY PLAN
Audrey could not feel her hands.
Kessler explained that Carlo expected the trust to activate the instant the child was born alive.
The plan was not to prevent the birth entirely.
It was to create chaos immediately afterward.
Audrey would be declared unstable or medically incapacitated.
Preston would be pushed into temporary control.
Carlo would use the emergency documents to seize voting authority before the court understood what had happened.
Brenda, however, had become impatient.
“She believed the baby never being born was cleaner,” Kessler said.
Preston turned away and vomited into a trash can.
Audrey did not comfort him.
Rocco asked the only question that mattered.
“Where is Carlo?”
Kessler shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
Gary searched the clinic office.
Inside a locked drawer, he found a prepaid phone.
The latest message was from Carlo.
THE WOMAN LOST CONTROL.
MOVE TO PLAN B.
Gary scrolled.
Another message appeared beneath it.
GET SOFIA’S LEDGER BEFORE ROCCO FINDS IT.
Preston looked up.
“The ledger my father died for.”
Audrey remembered Sofia’s letter.
Room 214 held proof, but the flash drive contained only copies.
The original ledger was still somewhere else.
Rocco searched his memory.
Sofia had once kept an ugly green cookbook in the kitchen and refused to let anyone throw it away.
Audrey laughed through tears.
“She hated cooking.”
“Exactly.”
They returned to the old Bellini house where Audrey had grown up.
The cookbook was still on a high shelf in a locked pantry.
Inside the hollowed pages was no ledger.
Only a photograph of Sofia and Thomas Hale standing beside a church.
On the back, Sofia had written:
WHERE WE PUT THE TRUTH UNDER GOD’S EYES.
Preston recognized the church.
“My parents were married there.”
Gary looked at the name printed beneath the photograph.
St. Raphael’s Chapel.
May you like
Then his phone buzzed.
A motion alarm had just triggered at the chapel.
