Chapter 6 - The Secret of the Case
Luca frowned, his gaze dropping back to the small girl sleeping peacefully on Damian’s chest. “You know her?”
Damian didn’t answer right away. Slowly, deliberately, he opened his right fist.
The silver Patek Philippe lay revealed on his palm, the heavy chain draping down between his fingers, glinting in the dying sunlight.
Luca’s breath hitched. He stepped forward, leaning down, his stoic face contorting in utter shock. As Vincenzo’s former driver and bodyguard in his younger days, Luca knew the artifact instantly.
“God in heaven…” Luca whispered, his hand instinctively crossing his chest. “Is that… that’s the old man’s watch.”
“She was carrying it,” Damian said, his voice flat, devoid of warmth. “Stuffed inside that mangled rabbit under her arm.”
Luca’s eyes darted from the silver watch to the little girl’s face, searching her features. “Vincenzo’s watch? Boss, Vincenzo disappeared ten years ago. This kid isn't even four years old. Where did she get it? Who gave it to her?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Damian murmured.
He brought the watch closer to his face. The front casing was familiar, every scratch an old memory. But as Damian turned the heavy silver disk over in his hand, letting the back of the case catch the amber beam of the setting sun, something caught his eye.
The back of Vincenzo’s watch had always been smooth, polished silver, unadorned by engravings. Vincenzo had believed that engraving a timepiece brought bad luck—it was an arrogance that assumed the watch would belong to only one man.
Yet here, scratched deep into the heavy silver backplate, were fresh, jagged lines.
They were not professional jeweler engravings. They had been carved by hand, etched into the silver with the tip of a hardened steel blade—perhaps a tactical knife or an awl. The marks were raw, uneven, cut deep into the metal with desperate, frantic force.
The camera never reveals the full text.
Only Damian’s eyes moved across the words, tracking three lines of scratched script that had been hidden away inside the body of a child's toy.
As he read the second line, the color completely drained from Damian Romano’s face.
His pupils dilated. The muscle along his left jaw began to twitch violently, a sudden, explosive spasm of shock that shattered his composure entirely. His breath caught in his throat with a dry, rattling gasp.
Luca saw the shift instantly. He had seen Damian take a bullet to the shoulder without groaning; he had seen him watch his closest allies turn traitor without blinking. But he had never, in fifteen years, seen the man look completely, undeniably terrified.
Luca stepped directly beside the bench, his hand resting on his hip, his voice tight with alarm.
“Boss… what is it? What does it say?”
Damian did not answer. He couldn’t.
The words etched into the silver backplate were burned into his retinas, rewriting everything he thought he knew about his father’s death, the empire he ruled, and the war that had consumed his life.
Slowly, his trembling hand turned the watch back over, pressing the lid closed with a muted click.
He didn't look at Luca.
Instead, Damian lowered his gaze to the little girl curled against his ribs. His eyes raked over her wild brown curls, the soft curve of her cheek, and the tiny, dusty hand still gripping his lapel.
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With a slow, deliberate movement, Damian Romano brought his arm around Mia, pulling her small, fragile body closer to his chest, locking her into the crook of his arm with a fierce, desperate protectiveness that left Luca completely speechless.
“Luca,” Damian whispered, his voice dangerously low, vibrating with a lethal, terrifying promise. “Cancel the sweep. Call nobody. You and I are the only two people on this earth who know this girl is here.”
