Chapter 6 - THE SILVER ROSE OF THE PAST
Nathan stepped into the bedroom, his polished shoes striking the bare wood with a heavy, deliberate finality.
Lily darted in behind him, squeezing past his long legs to throw herself across the cot, wrapping her small arms around Sarah’s neck. “Mom! I tried to give him the envelope! I told him you were working!”
Sarah’s weak, trembling hand lifted from the quilt, her long, pale fingers threading through Lily’s brown curls, smoothing the blue ribbon. “Hush, my sweet girl. It’s okay. You did so well. You did everything right.”
Nathan stood at the foot of the narrow bed. His broad shoulders blocked the doorway, his hands clenched into tight fists inside his coat pockets, fighting down a monstrous, suffocating wave of rage, grief, and bewilderment.
“Why, Sarah?” Nathan asked, his voice low, gravelly, vibrating with an agony he had never allowed another living soul to hear. “Ten years. You let me believe you were dead. You let me bury an empty plot in Rosehill Cemetery while you lived in this… this hellhole?”
Sarah closed her eyes, drawing a shallow, wheezing breath that rattled in her congested lungs. “I had to, Nate. Your father… he came to my studio the night before the Drake Hotel was hit. He showed me the surveillance photos. He said if I stayed with you, your enemies wouldn't just kill me—they’d use me to break you. He said the only way you’d survive the succession was if you had no heart left to shoot through.”
Nathan flinched as if struck. His father, Old Man Moretti, had orchestrated her disappearance to forge him into an unfeeling monster.
“And I was already carrying her,” Sarah added, her voice dropping into a raw, sacred whisper, her hand tightening around Lily’s small shoulder.
Nathan’s heart stopped. The world narrowed to a pinpoint.
He looked down at Lily.
The slate-gray eyes. The stubborn, square jawline. The identical cadence of her silence. Seven years old. Conceived in the final, desperate winter before the war.
She wasn't just a tenant’s child. She was his blood. The daughter of the Moretti dynasty, sewing buttons on frozen floorboards while his lieutenants drank forty-year-old scotch in penthouses bought with his gold.
Nathan felt the floor drop out from beneath him.
He turned his head slowly, his eyes drawn back through the open doorway toward the living room, focusing on the vintage cast-iron sewing machine resting under the bare bulb.
Something about the machine had bothered him from the second he stepped through the front door.
Leaving the bedroom, Nathan walked back into the living room. His footsteps were heavy, slow, like a man walking through a dream. He approached the oak cabinet and knelt down beside the iron frame.
He reached out his bare, scarred hand. His thumb wiped away a layer of fine machine oil and black lint from the curved cast-iron base, near the rear bobbin winder.
There, stamped into the iron thirty years ago by an Italian craftsman in Genoa, was a tiny, raised emblem.
A silver rose, entwined with a winding stem and two sharp thorns.
It was the private maker's mark of Nathan’s late mother, Rosa Moretti. The machine had been her prized possession, brought over from Sicily in 1972, the machine she had used to sew Nathan’s first school uniforms. When his mother died of cancer twenty years ago, the machine had sat in the family estate until it mysteriously disappeared during the chaos of the 2014 war.
Nathan had thought the looters took it.
He stared at the silver rose, his fingers tracing the cold metal, his breath catching in his throat.
Behind him, Sarah’s weak voice drifted from the bedroom, carried on a shallow, ragged breath.
May you like
“Lily…” Sarah whispered. “Show him what’s hidden underneath.”
Nathan went completely, terrifyingly still.
