“I was twenty-eight when I met Luca,” Elena said. “I was working as an accountant for a shipping company at the docks.”
“A Moretti company,” Maya said coldly.
Luca looked out the window. “One of them.”
“I found records I was not meant to find,” Elena continued. “Payments. Names. Routes. People who disappeared after signing contracts they did not understand.”
Maya swallowed. “Human trafficking?”
Elena closed her eyes. “Among other things.”
The car seemed to shrink around them.
“I copied everything,” Elena said. “I thought I could go to the police. I was foolish.”
“You were brave,” Luca said.
Elena looked at him. Something old passed between them.
Maya saw it and felt sick. “Were you together?”
“No,” Elena said quickly.
Luca said nothing.
The silence answered too much.
Elena’s voice softened. “Luca was not the man in charge then. His father was. Vittorio Moretti. And above Vittorio was a council called the Black Table. Politicians, judges, bankers, men who smiled on magazine covers while buying lives in private rooms.”
Maya felt cold spread through her.
“My father found out what I had taken,” Luca said. “He ordered her death.”
Maya turned to him. “And you stopped him?”
“I tried.”
Elena’s eyes filled with old horror. “They came for us on a rainy night. You were five. You were asleep in the back seat.”
Maya remembered rain.
Not the crash. Not clearly. Only rain sliding across glass. Her mother singing softly. Headlights too bright. Then a scream.
“The accident,” Maya whispered.
“It was not an accident,” Elena said. “A truck hit us on the bridge. I pushed you out before the car went over.”
Maya’s fingers curled against her knees.
“I woke up in a clinic three days later,” Elena continued. “Luca had taken me there. You were already hidden with your aunt.”
“Aunt Ruth always said she found me at the hospital.”
“She lied because I begged her to.”
Maya laughed once, brokenly. “Everyone lied because they loved me. How convenient.”
Elena reached for her.
Maya pulled away.
Pain trembled across Elena’s face, but she accepted it.
“I wanted to come back,” she said. “Every day. But Vittorio believed I had died in the river. If he learned I was alive, he would search for what I had stolen. And if he found you…”
She could not finish.
Luca did. “He would have used Maya to draw Elena out.”
Maya turned toward him. “So why now? Why show me that photograph tonight?”
Luca’s expression darkened.
“Because your name appeared on a list yesterday,” he said.
“What list?”
Elena looked at Luca sharply. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“I was going to.”
“You never change.”
“And you never stay hidden.”
Maya slammed her palm against the seat. “Enough. What list?”
Enzo glanced at them in the mirror, then looked back at the road.
Luca reached into his coat and removed a folded paper. He handed it to Maya.