Chapter 4 - SOFIA’S WARNING
The sealed amendment had spent nine years inside a bank vault.
Rocco had never touched it.
Audrey held it now with trembling fingers.
“Mom knew?”
Rocco stared at Sofia’s handwriting.
“She feared something.”
“From who?”
Gary answered before Rocco could.
“From the Hales.”
Preston’s face drained of color.
“My family didn’t even know Audrey then.”
Gary looked at him.
“Your mother did.”
The room went silent.
Gary explained that Brenda Hale had worked for a private investment firm that handled debt for several Bellini companies twelve years earlier.
She had attended meetings with Sofia.
She had also been fired after Sofia accused someone inside the firm of moving money through false vendors.
“Brenda?” Audrey asked.
“We never proved it,” Rocco said.
“You never told me.”
“You were seventeen.”
“I’m not seventeen now.”
Rocco took the anger without defending himself.
Audrey broke the wax seal.
Inside was a handwritten letter and a small brass key.
The letter began with her name.
Audrey,
If you are reading this, then someone has decided your child is worth more dead than alive.
Audrey covered her mouth.
Preston looked sick.
She kept reading.
Do not trust anyone who asks you to sign medical authority away from yourself.
Do not trust anyone who says an accident would solve a family problem.
And if the Hale name is anywhere near you, find the records I hid before I died.
Audrey looked up at Preston.
He whispered, “I swear I never knew she wrote that.”
At the bottom of the page was an address.
An old Bellini warehouse on the river.
Rocco frowned.
“That building was emptied years ago.”
Gary held up the brass key.
“Then Sofia expected something to stay there.”
Audrey read the final line aloud.
The room marked 214 contains proof of who tried to buy my silence.
Preston suddenly sat down.
Rocco noticed.
“Why did that number scare you?”
May you like
Preston looked at the floor.
“Because 214 is my mother’s birthday.”
