Chapter 2 - The Blue Room
The emergency lights blinked on, washing the study in red.
Lorenzo moved first. He swept Mia behind the desk and drew the pistol from the drawer. The hallway lock clicked again.
“Stay down,” he whispered.
“I know how to stay down.”
“Good. Do it.”
A burst of gunfire tore through the study door. Wood splintered above the desk. Lorenzo fired twice through the lower panel, then dragged a bookcase across the entrance. The shots stopped.
Mia was already crawling toward the service hatch.
“Where does that go?” he demanded.
“Laundry room.”
“How do you know?”
“I told you. I notice things.”
The hatch opened into a narrow passage. Lorenzo pushed her through, then followed. They came out behind the pantry, where two kitchen workers were frozen beside a stack of plates.
“Basement,” he ordered them. “Lock yourselves in.”
Mia tugged his sleeve. “Not the basement. The blue room.”
He stared at her.
“My dad said the key was for that room. He said if you got it, you had to see what was inside before Raffaele did.”
Lorenzo had not opened the blue room in eleven years. It had belonged to Sofia, his wife, who had died in a car bombing that was meant for him. He had closed the room after the funeral and never returned.
“Why would Luca know about it?”
“He was there that night.”
The answer hit harder than the gunfire.
Lorenzo took the key. He led Mia through the old wing, past portraits covered in dust sheets. The blue room door stood at the end of the corridor. The brass lock turned with a reluctant click.
Inside, everything remained exactly as Sofia had left it: a piano with a sheet of music open, a yellow scarf on the chair, a child's drawing pinned to the wall. Lorenzo stopped at the drawing. It showed three figures beneath a crooked sun. Sofia, Lorenzo, and a little girl who had never been born.
Mia walked to the desk and pulled open the bottom drawer.
“Your wife kept things in envelopes,” she said. “Dad told me.”
Inside lay a small recorder and a photograph of Luca standing beside Sofia. On the back, in Sofia's handwriting, were six words:
If Lorenzo forgets, remind him why.
The recorder crackled. Sofia's voice filled the room, thin with static.
“Lorenzo, if you're hearing this, then someone inside the house has moved against us. Don't trust the council. Don't trust the man who tells you Luca betrayed you.”
Lorenzo's fingers tightened around the recorder.
A second voice came through.
Raffaele's.
“She's not supposed to leave this room alive.”
Mia went pale.
May you like
The recording stopped.
Behind them, the blue room door began to close.
