Page 2 of Worth the Risk

When her eyes stopped pouring, she glanced around in disgust. “It’s like trying to find a needle in a dust-ridden haystack.” A burst of color caught her eye. The lid to a large box on the floor had shifted, probably knocked loose in the shower of shoeboxes, revealing hidden treasure inside—scarves. Tons of them. Knit, silk, satin, cotton in every color imaginable. Isabella selected one made of tightly woven satin, tied it over her mouth and nose, and went back to searching.

An hour later, she’d made her way to the back wall but still hadn’t found the old, beaten-up steamer trunk that belonged to her grandfather Conti. Tears stung her eyes, not from dust this time, but remembering the stories Mama would tell from her childhood as they pored over the pictures, sometimes for hours. Isabella wanted to write down what she could remember and preserve the memories for her own children one day.

“But where the heck is that darn trunk?”

With her hands on her hips, she turned in a circle. She’d made the mess worse with her hurried and increasingly frustrated searching. Tired, hot, and sweaty, the satin mask not helping matters, she gave up on finding it up here.

“Maybe it’s in the garage.”

She turned to make her way out of the corner she had boxed herself into then hissed in pain when something sharp scratched her arm. Shining her light at her arm, she saw a rip in her sleeve and the culprit, a rusty nail protruding from the wall.

“Great,” she grumbled as she worked to free the snagged material. “Now I get to look forward to a tetanus shot.”

When she couldn’t untangle the threads from the nail, she jerked her arm, ripping her shirt farther. Not that it mattered, since it was ruined anyway. Her violent motion pulled the nail and the board it was half embedded into away from the wall. Before it snapped back, Isabella caught the briefest glimpse of space behind it.

Curious, she pried the board loose. Inside, she saw something white, but it was too dark to make out what it was. Not about to stick her hand in blindly—Isabella shivered at the thought of rats and spiders—she shone her phone flashlight inside.

When beady eyes didn’t peer back at her and she didn’t hear tiny claws scurrying about, she reached inside and retrieved the box. After pulling a dusty sheet off the rocking chair from her old nursery, she sat with it in her lap.

Never one to possess ESP of any kind, a chill of foreboding swept through her. For someone to have gone to the trouble of hiding the box behind the wall for what must have been years, whatever was inside had to be explosive. Considering her father’s career choice, it could be anything...and awful.

As her pulse pounded, she carefully lifted the lid. Inside was another box, white with pink ribbons and bows and toe shoes painted on the sides. She had one much like it on a shelf in her room. As expected, a ballerina popped up, twirling on a spring as a tinkling song played. It only plunked out a few notes, the music box requiring winding for it to keep going.

Compared to the dirty, scuffed outer box, it looked brand new—and empty. But Isabella knew its secret and lifted the velvet-lined jewelry tray, revealing the hidden compartment underneath. Tucked inside was an old photo of her mother. She looked to be around Isabella’s age now, maybe younger, as was the handsome man beside her. He had his arm around her waist and his head resting against hers. Both of them were smiling at the camera.

They looked happy... and in love. But the man wasn’t her father.

Isabella flipped the photo over. On the back, her mother had written, “With Marcus. 12 weeks.” Below it was a tarnished key secured with tape.

Immediately, she flipped it again, studying the man closer. He had wavy black hair and blue eyes. Like her. How many times had she wondered how she got sky-blue eyes and jet-black hair, when both her parents were brown-haired and brown-eyed like the rest of the Contis and Giordanos?

She’d looked it up once. Brown-eyed parents had only a 6.3 percent chance of having a blue-eyed baby. Low, but not impossible. With hair color, two brunettes produced a black-haired child only 0.5 percent of the time. She’d asked her mother who said some aunt or uncle from the past must have passed it on to her. But no pictures of those relatives ever materialized.

The suspicions she’d had growing up that something wasn’t quite right intensified. Was Marcus Pietro her father? Could she base that on a photograph?

As all the other pieces of the puzzle fit together—her father’s distance, how she looked like no one else in her family, the12 weeksnotation written in her mother’s hand, and a feeling—a million and one questions swirled in her head. Most of them began withwhy?

Why had her mother never told her? Why would she lie all these years? If her father knew, why had he gone along with the story?

She knew little about the Pietros, other than they had territory, wealth, and power in the city and were her family’s biggest rivals.

Why would her mother be with the enemy?

She imagined aRomeo and Juliet, star-crossed lovers’ story. But these weren’t two teenagers, and it was real life, not Shakespeare.

Isabella did the math. Aloud, since it was hardly her best subject.

“I was born in June when Mama was twenty-eight. If she was three months pregnant with me, it would have been early December. Mama and Father had a Christmas wedding.”

What happened that her mother, within weeks of the photo, would marry another man, from yet another rival family, who would raise her child as his own?

She vaguely recalled a story about the only son of the old Pietro boss dying at a young age and a cousin taking over the family. Had Lorenzo stepped in to give her legitimacy? Doubtful. He was a ruthless businessman and did nothing that didn’t benefit him financially.

Her stomach twisted, and she felt ill, certain something nefarious was behind it. She desperately needed to find out what. With the utmost care not to rip the yellowed paper, she peeled the key off the back. For her mother to have hidden it away with the photograph that in one fell swoop changed Isabella’s entire life, whatever it unlocked must hold the answers.

Funny that the trunk had suddenly gone missing. Could the two be connected? She didn’t remember her mother needing a key all the times they’d looked through the treasures stored in the trunk. Maybe her sleep-deprived mind was making things out of nothing.

But she sure as heck wouldn’t sleep until she resolved the mysteries of the key, the trunk, and her real father.

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