Page 49 of Vows Made in Silence

And that choice means everything.

Turk swears under his breath. "She snuck out before we locked the perimeter. Took something. Probably intel. Files."

"Why the hell wouldn’t she tell me?" I mutter.

He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t need to.

Because that’s when it hits me.

She doesn’t know what she knows.

And someone else is counting on that.

The buried secret—the one Vittorio died with; the one Gallo keeps bleeding for—it’s tied to her. To something she saw. Or heard. Or touched. Years ago.

Something she might not even remember—yet. A name in a ledger. A whispered conversation in the dark. A painting that shouldn't have been moved.

Or maybe—just maybe—it’s something worse. Something hidden inside a frame. A forged certificate. A smuggled relic. An unaccounted transaction.

What if the art was never about the art?

What if Giuliana was the blind courier, the trusted curator who walked past secrets she didn’t even know she carried?

I stare at the screen, at the image of her vanishing into the night.

What if the key to all of this… is locked in her memory?

Where’s the duffel bag?

Turk rewinds another feed from the safe house. Giuliana slipping back inside. Hair damp. Clothes changed. The bag? Gone. Not with her.

"She stashed it," I murmur. "Somewhere inside."

Turk nods, already calling in a team to search every inch of the property.

I push away from the monitors.

Turk’s men move like phantoms, tearing through the safe house with precision and silence.

Drawers overturned. Wall panels tapped. Floorboards checked for hollows. This isn’t just a sweep—it’s an excavation.

Then someone calls out.

“Boss. You’re going to want to see this.”

The voice comes from a storage room off the east corridor—Giuliana’s assigned quarters. I stride in, pulse hammering.

Turk is already crouched beside the bed, dragging out a false panel from the baseboard. A flash of canvas. A duffel bag.

My heart lurches.

The moment the zipper peels back, it’s like opening a vault of ghosts.

Inside:

Stacks of aged documents—yellowed at the corners, marked with Moretti letterhead from two decades ago. Handwritten notations in Vittorio’s scrawl. Ledgers, sealed manifests. A single signature repeated: Adriano Vescari.

Photos—black-and-white surveillance shots. Of warehouses. Docks. Paintings being loaded into unmarked trucks. Giuliana appears in some of them—years younger, unaware she’s even in the frame. Holding a clipboard. Smiling. Cataloging the wrong damn pieces.