Chapter 6 - The Rising of the Water
The dive team arrived under the cover of midnight. Three black vans pulled down the lower service road, their headlights turned off to avoid alarming the few lingering guests who were staying in the east wing guest suites.
Dante stood on the wooden dock, wrapped in a long black overcoat, watching the black water. The rain had begun to fall—a cold, steady summer drizzle that created thousands of tiny ripples across the lake’s surface.
"Anything?" Dante asked as the lead diver surfaced near the edge of the dock, pushing his mask up onto his forehead.
"It’s strange, Mr. Moretti," the diver reported, his voice confused. "We found her heavy apron anchored in the lakebed mud about fifteen feet down. We found a pair of black women's shoes about ten yards down-current."
Dante leaned forward. "And her body?"
"That’s the thing, sir," the diver said, wiping water from his eyes. "There is no body. We’ve swept a fifty-yard radius around the dock. The current in the lake moves slowly toward the eastern outflow, but if she had drowned, she would be anchored in the weeds near the ledge. She isn't there."
Marco stepped up beside Dante, holding an umbrella over his boss. "Could the current have dragged her to the deep channel?"
"Not in four hours," the diver insisted. "And there’s something else. Look here."
The diver held up a heavy brass safety pin and a torn piece of pink cotton uniform fabric that had been snagged on a sharp rock near the riverbank reeds, seventy yards down-shore.
"She didn't drown," Dante murmured, a sudden, electric shock running through his veins.
"Sir?" Marco blinked.
"She stripped off the weighted apron under water," Dante said, a strange, breathless awe creeping into his voice. "She took off her shoes. She swam out."
He looked toward the thick, dark woods that bordered the eastern edge of the estate. The woods stretched for miles toward the state highway.
Elena Rossi was alive.
Meanwhile, three miles away, inside an abandoned boat caretaker’s cottage at the edge of the lake property, a fire was crackling softly in an old brick hearth.
Elena sat on a wooden crate near the flames, wrapped in an oversized wool blanket she had found in a storage chest. Her pale pink uniform lay drying on a rack near the hearth, stained with lake mud and torn at the seams.
Her skin was pale, her body aching, her fingers raw from tearing through the brush in the dark. But her eyes were bright, clear, and razor-sharp.
On the wooden table beside her lay three items she had salvaged from the waterproof leather pouch she kept strapped beneath her skirt—a habit she had formed years ago to keep her emergency cash safe from hotel thieves. Inside the pouch were two hundred dollars in cash, her small personal notebook containing four years of recorded observations at Villa Moretti, and a small, encrypted USB drive she had found in Julian Vance’s coat pocket two months ago while clearing the study.
She opened the small notebook.
Page after page was filled with her neat, precise handwriting. Dates. Times. License plate numbers. Account names mentioned over dinner tables. Offshore shell companies mentioned during private cigars on the balcony.
She had recorded it all not out of malice, but out of self-preservation. She had always known that in a house full of monsters, information was the only shield a servant possessed.
Now, it was no longer a shield. It was a weapon.
Elena picked up a charcoal pencil from the hearth mantel and opened the notebook to a blank page at the back. At the top of the page, in dark, heavy strokes, she wrote a single name:
BIANCA VITALI.
May you like
Beneath it, she began to outline her response. She was done hiding. She was done shrinking. They had thrown her into the dark water expecting her to sink.
Instead, they had given her the dark. And in the dark, Elena Rossi was queen.
