Chapter 3 - The Vault and the Video
The servant passages of Villa Moretti were a secret network of narrow stone hallways hidden behind the double walls, built during Prohibition to move contraband without being seen from the grand state rooms.
Alejandro led us through a concealed wooden panel inside his study wardrobe. He carried a heavy tactical briefcase in one hand and kept his silenced pistol ready in the other. I walked between him and Mama, my little sneakers squeaking softly against the cold stone floor.
"Where are we going?" Mama whispered, her voice echoey in the dark passage.
"My private vault under the wine cellar," Alejandro answered without looking back. "It has its own air filtration, satellite communications, and an armored steel door that can withstand a RPG blast. More importantly... it holds the master terminal for my private camera network."
Five minutes later, after descending three flights of narrow spiral stairs, Alejandro pressed his palm against a biometrics scanner concealed behind a fake fuse box.
A heavy hydraulic hiss echoed through the basement as a eight-inch-thick steel door swung open, revealing a room lined with computer monitors, weapons racks, and plush leather furniture.
"Inside. Quick," Alejandro said.
Once the steel door sealed shut behind us, the deafening silence of the vault felt like a sanctuary.
Alejandro immediately sat down at the main console, plugging his encrypted USB key into the silver drive bay. The banks of monitors flickered to life, displaying fifty different camera angles from across the estate.
"Look," Alejandro said, pointing to Screen 4.
On the screen, we could see the grand dining room upstairs.
Standing beside the marble fireplace was a tall man in a tailored gray suit with slicked-back silver hair: Underboss Lorenzo. Surrounding him were eight heavily armed men wearing tactical gear without Moretti syndicate patches.
"Lorenzo brought outside mercenaries," Alejandro gritted his teeth. "He didn't trust my personal guard to do his dirty work."
Alejandro typed a series of commands on his keyboard, pulling up the archival feed from his study thirty minutes prior—the footage recorded by the hidden camera in the bookshelf.
He hit play.
The video showed Alejandro sitting at his desk, reviewing shipping manifests.
A minute later, the door opened, and a servant walked in carrying a silver tray with a crystal decanter of vintage 1982 Barolo.
It wasn't a stranger. It was Marco—Alejandro’s personal butler of twelve years, a man who had attended Alejandro’s father’s funeral and held Alejandro’s umbrella in the rain.
On the high-definition video, Marco set the tray down. While Alejandro turned his back to answer a phone call, Marco pulled a tiny glass vial from his waistcoat, emptied a fine gray powder into the wine glass, and stirred it gently with a silver pin.
"Peanut protein concentrate mixed with synthetic histamine," Alejandro whispered, his voice shaking with absolute betrayal. "Marco knew about my severe nut allergy. Only five people in the world knew."
"Why would Marco do that?" Mama asked, horrified. "He’s been with your family forever!"
"Because Lorenzo bought him," Alejandro said coldly, pulling up a second screen showing financial transfers. "Three million dollars deposited into an offshore account in the Cayman Islands two days ago."
On the monitor, the study footage continued to play.
It showed Alejandro taking a sip of the wine, setting the glass down, and collapsing forty seconds later as his throat seized shut. It showed Marco quietly leaving the room and locking the door from the outside.
Then, it showed a tiny four-year-old girl in a pink rabbit backpack creeping into the frame, holding a blue-and-orange plastic tube.
Alejandro paused the video right at the moment I pressed the EpiPen into his leg, my small face wrinkled in pure determination.
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He stared at the paused image for a long, quiet minute.
"He tried to kill a dynasty with a glass of wine," Alejandro said, turning his head to look down at me as I sat on the leather couch, sharing my animal crackers with Barnaby the rabbit. "And a four-year-old rebuilt it with a toy backpack."
