Chapter 4 - Somebody Was Listening

Elias crushed the microphone beneath his shoe.

“Congratulations,” Marisol said. “Now we can’t trace it.”

His security chief, Owen Vale, looked offended. “Watch your mouth.”

“She’s right,” Giata said. “You should try listening to people without breaking things.”

Elias ignored them both. “How long was it there?”

Owen checked the vent. “Professional installation. Could be months.”

“Your team checks this floor every week.”

“Then someone had access between sweeps.”

Constance crossed herself. A doctor, a caregiver, a cleaner, a relative. Nearly anyone who had been invited into Giata’s life could have planted it.

Elias ordered another sweep. Men opened lamp bases and ran scanners along window frames. Giata watched from her chair, furious at how easily her room had become a crime scene again.

“Ask me what I want,” she said.

“What?”

“I want Marisol here. I want the piano uncovered. And I want a doctor who talks to me instead of you.”

“You found a bug in your room. This isn’t the time.”

“This is exactly the time.”

Elias stared at her. Then, slowly, he nodded once.

Downstairs, Marisol called her nineteen-year-old brother, Nico. He answered over the noise of a mechanic’s shop.

“Still alive?” he asked. “Rich people need their floors polished?”

“Listen. Don’t go straight home tonight. Stay at Aunt Celia’s.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

“Mari, you sound like Dad did when he knew something was wrong.”

The comparison hurt more than she expected. “Please, Nico.”

An hour later, a messenger arrived with a cream envelope addressed to Marisol. No stamp. No return address. Inside was a photograph of her father beside the black town car on the afternoon he died.

On the back, somebody had written: STOP ASKING ABOUT THE BRIDGE.

There was something else in the picture. Mateo was leaning toward a man whose hand rested on the car door. The face was cut off, but a heavy ring flashed in the sun: a silver lion with dark blue eyes.

Marisol hurried toward Elias’s study. She stopped when she heard voices through the door.

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“Your sister remembers too much,” a man said.

And Elias answered, “Then we’re almost out of time.”