Chapter Eleven: Beneath the Roots
621 Words
Rain clung to the earth like memory.
Matteo stood in the grove long after Enzo had vanished from sight, his coat soaked, the mud sucking at his boots. Somewhere in the trees behind him, Raffaele’s men scouted in a wide circle, but Matteo felt no safer.
He no longer feared bullets in the dark.
He feared silence.
Back at the villa, the olive crate sat untouched in the corner of his study.
Matteo had told no one about the third cufflink.
He’d held it in his hand for an hour before slipping it into a leather pouch and hiding it in the hollow wall of his father’s wine cellar.
One cufflink could be lost.
Two made a pair.
Three meant a lie.
He called Father Paolo to the house before sunrise.
The priest arrived pale, tired, and unusually tense. Matteo brought him into the chapel and closed the doors behind them.
“I need to know what my father confessed to you in his last weeks.”
Father Paolo looked up sharply. “That was between us.”
“He’s dead. I might be next.”
Silence stretched in the dim light, broken only by the flicker of votive candles.
“He was afraid,” Paolo said finally. “But not of Vitale. He feared something… older.”
Matteo’s brow furrowed. “What does that mean?”
“He believed someone close — someone bound by blood — had betrayed him. But he refused to name them. He said...” Paolo hesitated. “He said, a rotten root poisons the whole tree.”
After Paolo left, Matteo found Giulia waiting in the old library, flipping through a thick binder of newspaper clippings.
“I’ve been digging,” she said without looking up. “Your father’s assassination wasn’t the first.”
Matteo crossed the room. “Go on.”
“There were other deaths. Quiet ones. Spread out over ten years. Three lieutenants. A driver. One of your father’s lawyers. All ruled ‘natural causes’ or accidents.”
Matteo leaned over her shoulder. Giulia flipped the pages faster now, her voice quickening.
“But there’s a pattern. All five had one thing in common — they were part of a meeting your father held ten years ago. A secret one. No records, no details. Only that afterward, things changed. He consolidated power. Cut ties with certain families. Built walls.”
Matteo froze.
“My father said almost nothing about that year. Only that it cost him things he could never name.”
That afternoon, Matteo walked the property with Raffaele.
“You’ve been with this family longer than most,” Matteo said quietly. “You knew my father well.”
Raffaele nodded. “I served him until the end.”
“Did you know who he feared?”
Raffaele stopped walking. His voice lowered. “Antonio.”
Matteo blinked. “Antonio was his oldest friend.”
“Yes,” Raffaele said softly. “And sometimes, that’s who you fear the most.”
That night, as the storm rolled in again, Matteo took the long hallway toward the wine cellar.
He moved alone, torchlight flickering off the stones.
He needed time. Space. He needed to think.
He opened the hidden wall panel behind the vintage barolos — where the third cufflink now rested.
Except—
It was gone.
His breath caught.
The leather pouch lay open. Empty.
Only a single piece of parchment had been left in its place.
Matteo unfolded it with shaking hands.
In neat, careful script:
“You’re not your father.
But you’re getting close.”
Footsteps echoed upstairs.
Matteo grabbed his revolver and turned.
Too late.
The wine cellar door had just clicked shut.
From the other side.
Locked.
- Writer
