PART 2 All my life, men noticed my sister first and forgot I was standing beside her
PART 2
The sound tore through the terrace like the sky cracking open.
One moment, Carter Battalia was standing in front of me, his shoulders relaxed, his eyes still holding the last trace of warmth from our strange conversation. The next, his hand closed around my wrist and he pushed me down behind the thick stone railing with a speed that stole the breath from my lungs.
Glass burst inward behind him.
Not all of it. Just enough to glitter through the air like frozen rain.
Women screamed inside the ballroom. The orchestra stopped mid-note, leaving behind a terrible ringing silence before panic rushed in to fill it.
“Stay down,” Carter said.
It was not loud. It did not need to be.
The man who had interrupted us—broad-shouldered, gray-eyed, with the calm expression of someone who had already calculated every exit—moved to Carter’s side.
“Single shot,” he said. “West window. No one down.”
“No one?”
“No one visible.”
Carter’s eyes flicked toward the ballroom, then to me.
I realized I was still gripping the railing with both hands. My fingers had gone pale. I could hear my own breathing, uneven and embarrassing, as if my body had decided to be afraid before I had given it permission.
“Doriana,” Carter said.
My name sounded different now. Sharper. More urgent.
“I’m fine.”
I was not sure why I lied. Perhaps because Mafala had trained me to make myself convenient. Perhaps because I did not want this man, of all people, seeing me tremble.
Carter looked at my hands.
“You are not fine,” he said. “But you are standing, and that is enough for now.”
Before I could respond, two more of his men stepped onto the terrace. They were not frantic. That unnerved me more than if they had been. They spoke quietly, using glances more than words, and somehow the chaos inside the ballroom began to reorganize around them.
Guests were being directed away from the windows. Hotel staff moved toward the interior doors. Someone sobbed near the harp. A waiter stood frozen with a tray of shattered champagne flutes until one of Carter’s men gently took it from him and guided him aside.
Nothing about Carter looked surprised.
That was what frightened me.
He did not look like a man in danger. He looked like a man who had expected danger to arrive and was only mildly irritated it had chosen tonight.
“I need to go inside,” I said suddenly.
Carter turned his head.
“My sister.”
Something changed in his expression. Not softness exactly. Something closer to calculation wrapped around concern.
“Luca,” he said.
The gray-eyed man moved before I even understood he had been addressed.
“I’ll find her,” Luca said.
“No,” I said, pushing myself upright. “I’ll find her.”
Carter blocked me with a single step. “You will not walk into broken glass and panic because your sister forgot how to stay still.”
“You don’t know my sister.”
“I know enough.”
The words landed oddly.
I stared at him.
Before I could ask what he meant, Mafala appeared in the terrace doorway.
Her hair, which had been arranged in glossy waves an hour ago, had loosened around her face. Her perfect red mouth was parted, not from fear, but from fury. Of course. Mafala could turn even panic into an accusation.
“There you are,” she snapped at me. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
Carter went very still.
I almost laughed. Not because anything was funny, but because some part of me had known she would say that. A gunshot had shattered a ballroom window, and somehow I had become the most convenient explanation.
“What I’ve done?” I asked.
“You had to make a scene.”
“I was standing outside.”
“You ran out here with him.” Her gaze flicked to Carter, then back to me, bright with humiliation. “Everyone saw.”
“No,” Carter said.
Mafala looked at him as though she had forgotten he could speak.
“No one saw anything except fear,” he continued. “And people are rarely reliable when they are afraid.”
A flush climbed up Mafala’s throat. She opened her mouth, perhaps to charm him, perhaps to argue, but Luca stepped closer and spoke quietly.
“Miss Moretti, the hotel is moving guests to the east lounge. You should go with them.”
Mafala did not move.
“Miss Moretti,” Carter said, and his voice was smooth enough to cut glass, “go inside.”
It was not shouted. It was not cruel.
It was final.
For the first time in my life, I watched my sister obey someone without pretending it had been her idea.
She looked at me before she turned away.
That look promised a later reckoning.
When she disappeared into the ballroom, the October air seemed to grow colder.
I wrapped my arms around myself, suddenly aware of every inch of exposed skin the borrowed red dress failed to cover. Carter noticed. Of course he did. Men like him missed nothing.
He removed his suit jacket and placed it over my shoulders.
It was warm from his body. Too intimate. Too steadying.
“I don’t need this,” I said.
“I know.”
“Then why give it to me?”
“Because needing something is not the only reason to accept it.”
I looked away first.
Inside, the ballroom had shifted from elegance into disorder. Music stands lay crooked. A curtain near the shattered window stirred in the wind. Hotel security moved among the guests, trying and failing to appear calm.
Carter guided me through the side corridor, his hand hovering near my back without quite touching me. He did not drag me. He did not order me. He simply moved as though he expected the world to clear a path for him, and it did.
We passed a gilded mirror near the powder room. For one brief second, I caught our reflection.
Carter in his black suit, now without the jacket. Me in Mafala’s red dress, wrapped in his dark wool coat, looking less like a woman from a charity gala and more like someone who had accidentally stepped into a story she did not understand.
The east lounge was crowded with guests speaking over one another in frightened whispers. Mafala stood near the fireplace with three women around her, one hand pressed dramatically to her chest. When she saw Carter enter beside me, the drama drained from her face.
I tried to return his jacket.
He did not take it.
“Keep it,” he said.
“For how long?”
His mouth curved faintly. “Until I ask for it back.”
It should have annoyed me. It did annoy me.
But beneath that was something worse.
It steadied me.
Luca approached Carter and lowered his voice. I caught only fragments.
“Police notified.”
“Photographer gone.”
“Package missing.”
Carter’s expression did not shift, but I felt the air around him tighten.
“Package?” I asked before I could stop myself.
Both men looked at me.
I should have pretended I had heard nothing. That would have been the sensible thing to do. But I had spent most of my life being sensible in corners, and tonight, for reasons I could not explain, the corner no longer felt safe.
Carter studied me.
“There was an item being delivered to me tonight,” he said.
“At a charity ball?”
“Yes.”
“That seems inconvenient.”
“It was meant to be discreet.”
“A gunshot is a strange kind of discretion.”
For a moment, his face did something unexpected.
He almost smiled.
Then it vanished.
“What item?” I asked.
“Something old.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is the safest version of one.”
Luca’s eyes moved between us. “Mr. Battalia, we should go.”
Carter held my gaze a second longer.
“You and your sister need a ride home.”
“We drove here.”
“With her behind the wheel?”
“I survived the first trip.”
“That was before someone shot out a hotel window.”
“I’m not your responsibility.”
“No,” he said. “You are not.”
The way he said it should have ended the conversation.
Instead, it made me wonder why he sounded as though he wished it were true.
Mafala appeared beside us before I could reply.
“There’s no need for that,” she said brightly, though her smile trembled at the edges. “I can take Doriana home.”
Carter did not look at her.
“Luca will escort you to your car.”
Mafala blinked. “Excuse me?”
“You should not leave alone.”
“How considerate,” she said, recovering quickly. “But perhaps Doriana and I can—”
“Doriana is coming with me.”
The lounge seemed to quiet again, though perhaps that was only my imagination.
Mafala’s eyes widened.
My heart gave one hard, foolish strike.
“I am?” I asked.
Carter finally looked at me, and for the first time since the gunshot, uncertainty crossed his face. It was brief, nearly invisible, but I saw it.
“You may refuse,” he said.
That surprised me more than anything else he had done.
Men like Carter Battalia were not supposed to offer choices. Yet there it was, placed between us like a delicate object.
Mafala gave a soft laugh.
“Don’t be absurd. Doriana doesn’t even know you.”
Carter’s gaze stayed on me.
“I know enough to decide whether I want a conversation,” I said.
My sister’s smile froze.
Carter offered his hand.
I looked at it.
Accepting would be foolish. Dangerous, probably. At the very least, it would give Mafala enough resentment to fuel the next year of family dinners.
But in that moment, I realized something that frightened me more than Carter did.
I was tired of making choices designed only to keep other people comfortable.
So I placed my hand in his.
His fingers closed around mine, warm and controlled.
Not possessive.
Protective, perhaps.
Or maybe I was naïve enough to want it to be.
We left through a private service corridor that smelled faintly of lemon polish and rainwater. Behind us, Mafala called my name once, sharp as a slap.
I did not turn around.
Outside, a black car waited beneath the hotel’s side awning. The rain had softened to mist, blurring the streetlights into halos. Carter opened the rear door himself.
I hesitated.
He noticed.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Somewhere quieter.”
“That is not a location.”
“No.”
“You understand why that isn’t reassuring.”
“I understand why many things about me are not reassuring.”
The honesty disarmed me.
I got in anyway.
The interior of the car smelled of leather, cedar, and something clean I could not name. Carter slid in beside me, leaving more space between us than I expected. Luca took the front passenger seat. Another man drove.
For several blocks, no one spoke.
Philadelphia moved past the windows in wet streaks of gold and black. Restaurants glowed on corners. A couple ran laughing beneath one umbrella. A cyclist cursed at a taxi. The city continued, indifferent to shattered glass and missing packages and men whose names made rooms fall quiet.
I pulled Carter’s jacket closer around me.
“Are you going to tell me what happened?” I asked.
Carter looked out the window.
“Someone wanted to interrupt a delivery.”
“That sounds like a business problem.”
“It is.”
“And I am in the car because?”
He turned to me then.
“Because the delivery was connected to you.”
The words slipped under my skin.
“That’s impossible.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. I work at a small art gallery. I spend most of my time convincing wealthy people that paintings do not need to match their sofas. I have no connection to deliveries requiring gunfire.”
Luca made a small sound from the front seat. It might have been amusement.
Carter ignored him.
“The item was a painting,” he said.
I stopped breathing for half a second.
“What painting?”
“A portrait. Nineteenth century. Woman in a blue dress, seated beside a piano. Unknown artist, though the signature was once believed to be Antonio Bellucci.”
I stared at him.
I knew that painting.
Not because I had seen it in a museum or a catalogue.
Because a print of it had hung in my mother’s sewing room when I was little. She used to stare at it on quiet afternoons, her thumb moving over the chipped frame as if she were touching someone’s face.
After she died, the print disappeared.
Mafala said it had been ugly and sentimental and probably ended up in one of the donation boxes.
I had believed her because I was sixteen and grieving and too exhausted to argue.
“My mother had a copy of that,” I said slowly.
Carter’s eyes sharpened.
“A copy?”
“A print. I think.”
“You are sure?”
“No.” I looked down at my hands. “I haven’t thought about it in years.”
Carter’s voice softened. “What was your mother’s name?”
“Elena.”
The car became very quiet.
Even Luca turned slightly.
“Elena Moretti?” Carter asked.
“Yes.”
He looked away.
It was the first time I had seen him look genuinely shaken.
“How did you know my mother?” I asked.
“I didn’t.”
“That is not the same as saying you don’t know her name.”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
My pulse climbed into my throat.
The car turned off Walnut Street and headed north. I should have asked to be taken home. I should have demanded answers, called Mafala, called anyone. But there are moments when curiosity becomes its own kind of gravity. Mine had me pinned to the seat.
Carter reached into the inside pocket of his shirt and removed a folded envelope.
It was old. Not antique, but old enough for the paper to have softened at the creases. My name was written across the front.
Doriana.
Not Miss Moretti. Not my full name.
Just Doriana, in handwriting I recognized with such sudden force that tears sprang to my eyes before I understood why.
My mother’s handwriting.
I did not touch it.
“Where did you get that?” I whispered.
“It was with the portrait.”
“The portrait that disappeared tonight?”
“Yes.”
“And you were going to what? Hand me a letter from my dead mother between champagne and dessert?”
He accepted the anger without flinching.
“I was going to confirm who you were first.”
“Who I was?”
“The woman I was told to find.”
“By whom?”
He did not answer quickly enough.
The car slowed before a narrow townhouse with black shutters and a brass number plate. It was not a mansion. Somehow that surprised me. I had imagined men like Carter living behind iron gates, surrounded by marble and suspicion. This house looked old, discreet, and impossible to read.
The driver opened Carter’s door. Carter stepped out, then offered his hand again.
I looked at the envelope.
“Give it to me.”
“Inside.”
“No. Now.”
His jaw tightened.
For one frightening second, I thought he would refuse.
Then he placed the envelope in my hand.
It felt lighter than grief and heavier than memory.
I broke the seal with shaking fingers.
Inside was a single sheet of paper and a small pressed violet, flattened and faded to gray-blue.
My mother had always loved violets.
I unfolded the letter.
My darling Doriana,
If this letter has reached you, then I failed to tell you the truth while I was alive. For that, forgive me if you can. There are things I hid because I thought silence would keep you safe. Perhaps it did for a while. Perhaps it only made you lonely.
There is a portrait you knew as a child. It is not valuable because of the woman painted on the canvas, though she was beautiful. It is valuable because of what your grandfather hid behind it before he vanished from Philadelphia.
Trust no one who wants the painting without telling you why.
Trust the son of Celeste Battalia only if he brings you this letter unopened.
He will know the rest.
I read the last line twice.
Then a third time.
My knees felt unsteady, though I was standing on the sidewalk and not moving at all.
Carter watched me without speaking.
“Celeste Battalia,” I said.
“My mother.”
“Your mother knew mine?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t think to mention that?”
“I wasn’t certain the letter was real.”
“It is.”
“I can see that now.”
I laughed once, a brittle sound. “How generous.”
His expression remained controlled, but something in his eyes shifted.
“I understand that you’re angry.”
“You understand nothing.” I held up the letter. “My mother died when I was sixteen. I spent years thinking the only secrets she left behind were hospital bills and a closet full of unfinished dresses. Now you appear at a gala, stare at me like you’ve been looking for me, and hand me a letter that says she trusted your mother more than her own daughter.”
A flicker of pain crossed his face.
“Doriana—”
“No.” My voice trembled, but I did not lower it. “Do not say my name like it belongs in your mouth just because she wrote yours into this.”
He went quiet.
Rain gathered on his dark hair and the shoulders of his white shirt. Without his jacket, he looked less untouchable. Still dangerous, yes. But human too, and somehow that made everything worse.
Luca stood near the steps, carefully pretending not to listen.
The front door of the townhouse opened.
An older woman appeared in the doorway, silver-haired and straight-backed, wearing a navy dress and a string of pearls. Her face was refined, her eyes sharp. I had never seen her before, yet recognition moved through me strangely, not of her features but of her presence. She carried herself like someone my mother might have respected.
“Carter,” she said. “Bring her in from the rain.”
He did not move.
The woman looked at me.
“You must be Doriana.”
I folded the letter against my chest. “And you must be Celeste Battalia.”
Her expression softened, though not in a simple way. There was regret in it. Relief too.
“I am.”
“Did you know my mother?”
Celeste’s hand tightened on the doorframe.
“Yes,” she said. “She was my dearest friend.”
The words struck harder than I expected.
My mother had a dearest friend I had never met.
My mother had a secret.
My mother had a whole piece of life she had folded away so neatly that neither of her daughters had known where to look.
I stepped into the townhouse because the rain was cold, because the letter was real, and because every instinct I had said the night was no longer about a broken ballroom window.
It was about my mother.
The house was warmer than I expected. Not grand, but full of old wood, polished floors, and books stacked in places where decoration should have been. A fire burned low in the sitting room. On one wall hung several framed sketches—street scenes, hands, a woman’s profile. Not expensive works meant to impress guests. Personal ones.
Celeste noticed me looking.
“Elena drew those,” she said.
My breath caught.
“My mother painted?”
“She did many things beautifully.”
“I only knew she sewed.”
“That too.”
I moved closer to the sketches. One showed a little girl asleep with her cheek pressed to a folded quilt. Beneath it, in my mother’s delicate hand, was written: D, summer rain.
Me.
I touched the frame lightly.
All at once, the room blurred.
I had thought grief became less sharp with time. It did not. It simply learned to hide better.
Celeste came to stand beside me, not too close.
“She wanted to tell you,” she said.
“Then why didn’t she?”
“Because by the time she believed the danger had passed, she was already ill. And when illness begins taking choices away, people often save their strength for the wrong battles.”
I swallowed.
“What danger?”
Celeste looked at Carter.
He stood near the doorway, quiet, distant enough to let this be my conversation but close enough to hear every word.
Celeste took a breath.
“Your grandfather, Matteo Moretti, worked as a bookkeeper for several powerful families in Philadelphia. Not just ours. He was careful, clever, and far too honest for the world he moved in.”
“My grandfather died before I was born.”
“No,” Celeste said gently. “He disappeared.”
The room tilted slightly.
“No,” I said. “My mother told us he died.”
“She told you what she needed you to believe.”
I pressed my fingers to my temple.
This was too much. Too many doors opening at once. Too many rooms inside my life I had never known existed.
“What did he hide behind the portrait?” I asked.
Celeste’s face tightened.
“Records.”
“What kind?”
“Names. Payments. Agreements. Evidence that could have ruined several men who are now old, respectable, and very invested in remaining that way.”
Carter’s voice entered quietly. “The portrait was supposed to come to me tonight. I was going to bring it here, verify it, and then decide how to protect you before anyone knew you were involved.”
I turned on him.
“Protect me from what?”
“Whoever took it.”
“Why would they care about me?”
“Because the letter makes you the key.”
I looked down at the paper still in my hand.
There it was, in my mother’s careful writing.
He will know the rest.
Only he did not know all of it. I could see that now. Carter Battalia, for all his control, was standing in his mother’s sitting room with answers slipping through his fingers just as quickly as mine.
A small, bitter part of me found comfort in that.
“You said the painting went missing tonight,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Who knew it would be there?”
Carter and Celeste exchanged a look.
“Very few people,” he said.
“Your people?”
“Yes.”
“The hotel?”
“Only the event coordinator knew a private piece was being transferred during the gala.”
“And the owner?”
Carter’s mouth flattened.
“The seller insisted on anonymity.”
“Convenient.”
“Very.”
I turned the letter over, as if the back might provide clearer instructions. It did not.
“What does Mafala have to do with this?” I asked.
Carter said nothing.
That was answer enough.
My stomach sank.
“No,” I said.
“Doriana—”
“No. She is vain and jealous and impossible, but she is not part of some conspiracy involving stolen paintings and my dead mother.”
“I didn’t say she was.”
“You thought it.”
“I consider possibilities. That is not the same as accusation.”
“You don’t know her.”
He held my gaze.
“I know she approached me three weeks ago.”
The words landed softly.
Their meaning did not.
“What?”
Carter glanced at Celeste, then back at me.
“She requested a meeting through a mutual acquaintance.”
“Mafala?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“She said she had access to something I wanted.”
I tried to make sense of that sentence and failed.
“That’s impossible. She didn’t know you wanted anything.”
“She knew enough to mention the portrait.”
My fingers tightened around the letter.
The fire cracked in the hearth.
Somewhere down the hall, a clock ticked with unbearable patience.
“Mafala had the painting?” I asked.
“I don’t know what she had,” Carter said. “She brought a photograph.”
“Of the portrait?”
“Yes.”
I could see my sister’s face in my mind, glowing with satisfaction as she told me the red dress cost more than I made in three months. Tonight, I had thought her only ambition was to leave with Carter Battalia because he was rich, dangerous, and admired by women who mistook fear for glamour.
But Mafala had known something.
She had chosen the dress.
She had brought me to the Belmont.
She had placed me near the bar and told me to keep my head down.
The memory shifted, rearranging itself into something uglier and more careful.
“Why would she bring me tonight?” I whispered.
No one answered.
That was when the front door opened again.
Luca entered, rain on his coat and a sealed plastic sleeve in his hand. Inside was a phone.
“We found this under a service cart outside the west corridor,” he said. “Hotel security almost missed it.”
Carter took it.
“Whose is it?”
Luca looked at me.
My skin went cold.
“It belongs to your sister.”
I stared at the phone through the plastic.
Mafala’s phone case was pearl-white with gold initials on the back. M.M. She had bought it in Rome and mentioned the fact at least twice a week for six months.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” I said quickly.
Luca said nothing.
Carter turned the phone over, studying it.
“Was she hurt?” I asked.
“No,” Luca said. “She left before we could speak to her.”
“Left?” My voice rose. “With who?”
“We’re checking.”
I reached for my own phone inside the tiny evening bag Mafala had insisted I carry because my regular purse was, in her words, tragic. My hands fumbled as I called her.
It rang once.
Twice.
Then went to voicemail.
I called again.
Nothing.
A text came through before the third call connected.
Unknown number.
I stared at the screen.
Come home alone. Do not trust the Battalias.
Beneath the message was a photograph.
For a moment, I did not understand what I was seeing.
Then the image clarified.
It was my apartment.
My narrow living room with the leaning bookshelf. The green chair by the window. The little table where I kept unpaid bills beneath a blue ceramic bowl.
On the wall above the chair, where there had always been a faded water stain I kept meaning to paint over, hung something I had never seen there before.
A portrait of a woman in a blue dress, seated beside a piano.
My mother’s portrait.
My missing childhood memory.
The stolen painting.
I looked up slowly.
Carter was watching me, his expression unreadable, but his eyes had gone dark.
Celeste whispered something in Italian under her breath.
My phone buzzed again.
This time, the message was from Mafala.
For once in your life, Doriana, listen to me.
Run from him.
Then a second message appeared before I could breathe.
And don’t ask why Mom wrote the letter to you instead of me.
