Chapter 6 - The Nanny Who Knew Too MuchPatricia disappeared before Victor’s men reached her apartment.
They found her closet empty, her burner phone smashed, and the floorboards beneath her bed pulled loose. Inside the hiding place were twenty thousand dollars in cash, three fake passports, and a child’s drawing of Leo torn neatly in half.
Victor did not tell me that part.
Leo did.
He found out because children in guarded mansions learn to listen through doors.
“She hated me,” he said that night.
We were in Alessia’s room—my room, though I still could not think of it that way. Rain tapped the windows. A nurse had changed my bandages and warned me that walking too much would reopen something important. Naturally, I had walked too much.
Leo sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed with colored pencils scattered around him.
“She didn’t hate you,” I said carefully.
“She said I was wrong.”
My stomach tightened. “Wrong how?”
Leo kept coloring. “Wrong quiet. Wrong sad. Wrong for making Daddy weak.”
I set down my tea.
Victor stood near the fireplace, motionless.
He had heard.
“Leo,” he said softly.
Leo’s pencil stopped.
The room held its breath.
Victor crossed to the bed and sat beside his son. He looked uncomfortable there, this feared man trying to fold himself into gentleness.
“You are not wrong,” he said.
Leo did not look up.
Victor’s voice changed, rougher. “I was wrong.”
That made Leo look.
Victor swallowed.
“I thought if I made this house quiet, nothing bad could reach you. I thought if I kept everyone at a distance, you would be safe. But I made you lonely.”
Leo’s eyes filled.
Victor touched his hair with heartbreaking hesitation.
“I am sorry.”
Leo stared at him as if apologies were a language he had never heard from his father.
Then he leaned forward and wrapped his arms around Victor’s neck.
Victor closed his eyes.
I looked away, because some things were too private even when they happened in front of you.
Later, after Leo fell asleep in his own room with two guards outside and a nightlight shaped like a moon, Victor came back.
He found me standing at the vanity, staring at Alessia’s pearl-handled brush.
“I keep thinking she’ll hate me,” I said.
Victor stopped near the door.
“Alessia?”
“She died. Then I got her room, her son’s trust, her husband’s name.”
“You did not take anything from her.”
“I’m breathing in her space.”
“This room hurt before you came into it.”
I met his eyes in the mirror.
“And now?”
His gaze held mine.
“Now it hurts differently.”
That was the closest he came to saying something real.
I turned around too quickly and winced.
Victor stepped forward, then stopped himself.
“May I?”
The question surprised me more than his touch would have.
I nodded.
He helped me back to the bed, one hand steady at my elbow. His palm was warm through the sleeve of my cardigan.
“You ask before touching me now?” I said.
“I should have asked before making you my wife.”
The words lowered something inside me.
“Yes,” I said. “You should have.”
He looked at the floor.
“I know.”
A knock interrupted us.
Dante entered with a folder.
“We traced Patricia’s last call,” he said.
Victor took the folder. “To whom?”
Dante hesitated.
“Luca Moretti.”
Adriana’s husband.
Victor’s expression closed.
I remembered Adriana’s wounded fury. Her defense. Her certainty that Luca only hated being powerless.
“Does Adriana know?” I asked.
“No,” Dante said.
Victor opened the folder.
Inside were phone records, photographs, and a copy of a bank transfer from an offshore account. Patricia had been paid two days before the attack.
By Luca.
Victor’s hand tightened until the paper bent.
“What happens now?” I asked.
He looked at Dante.
“Bring Luca in.”
“Alive?”
Victor’s eyes flicked to me, then back.
“Yes.”
That single word told me two things.
First, Victor wanted to kill him.
Second, my presence had stopped him.
Dante left.
Victor remained by the bed, staring at the folder.
“If Luca planned the attack, he planned to kill Leo,” I said.
Victor’s voice was flat. “Yes.”
“Then why alive?”
“Because I need to know who gave him the courage.”
I understood.
Luca might have paid Patricia. But someone bigger had given the order.
A phone rang on the nightstand.
Not Victor’s.
Mine.
The cheap phone I had used before the shooting, the one I thought had been destroyed.
Victor stared at it.
I stared too.
The screen showed an unknown number.
My hand shook as I answered.
A woman’s voice came through, soft and amused.
“Hello, Mrs. Romano.”
Victor went still.
“Who is this?” I asked.
The woman laughed.
May you like
“Ask your husband what really happened to Alessia.”
Then the line went dead.
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