This residential property that housed her had originally been only one building. Her deceased grandfather, and later her father, had expanded it to the sprawling mansion that set a knot in her gut. Especially the extra wing her father had added, where he handled ‘sensitive’ business matters. She never ventured into that wing, not unless absolutely necessary. Like it was today.
Swallowing, she slowly drove up the driveway, watching the lush green grass in the lawns roll by, watching her own bedroom window on the second floor. She had an entire suite to herself, with her own bedroom and a small study where she worked, her own walk-in closet, her own everything. She always had.
Morana had not grown up wanting for anything, not materially at least. If she'd wanted a new computer, she'd had one within hours. If she'd wanted a new dress, she'd had a whole selection of them. She used to think it was a sign of her father's affections - giving her whatever she'd wanted. She'd been corrected of that notion pretty early in life.
He'd kept her on the top floor above his own to keep an eye on her movements. Her wishes had been fulfilled so she wouldn't go out looking to fulfill them herself. She'd stopped wishing the moment she'd realized this, and taken her own choices into her own hands. At least as much as she could have.
Morana wondered, as she pulled up in front of the house manned by two guards, what it would have been like to have her mother while she'd grown up. Would the house have been home then?
Her mother had left her father and this life when a few years after Morana had been born. The marriage of Alice and Gabriel Vitalio had been made for the one reason older than love - business.
Alice's father had been a shady businessman working with Gabriel and they had sealed a lifelong deal with an arranged marriage. Her mother had tried to adapt to this life, this world. She really had. But in the end, after almost two years of trying, she'd decided to leave. From what Morana had heard, she'd tried to take her as well, but her father had put his foot down and given her an ultimatum - either leave alone or never leave at all. But Morana didn’t know how true these stories were.
She didn’t remember much from her childhood. Morana didn’t know where her mother was anymore. She had tried to track on more than one occasion, without the knowledge of her father. It had yielded no results. Her mother clearly didn’t want to be found, and after marriage to Gabriel Vitalio, she couldn’t really blame her.
Her father had never tried to shield her, protect her or cajole her into a false sense of security. Since she'd understood things, she'd known every gruesome and bloody thing there was to know about their world - things that fathers were supposed to hold back from their daughters.
Ironically, she admired and detested that about him. She knew because of that very reason that he would see the codes as a betrayal and have her killed for it. That would be his form of mercy for his daughter. He'd pick an expert to kill her and he'd ask him to make it painless. After all, there was an example to be made for treason against Gabriel Vitalio, Boss of Shadow Port.
Parking the car in her open slot, Morana got out to the sound of thunder rumbling in the sky and looked up at the arched doorway above the low stairs that led inside the house. One of her father's many goons stood against the door and she sighed, ignoring them like she had most of her life, and walked inside. Except for a few staff, she'd never spoken to her father's men, much less be friendly. They had ignored her and she had returned the favor.
The inside of the house was tasteful, with the foyer leading to the stairs upstairs and the corridor on the left leading to the other wing. Morana closed her eyes for a second, aware she was walking to her own certain death, but knowing that she had to. Keeping her father in the dark could cost way more lives, innocent lives. With his connections and his knowledge, he might be able to retrieve the codes and destroy them.
Slowly, she ambled towards the one section of the house she'd rarely visited. Focusing on keeping her breathing even and her head clear, she kept her palms curled into fists by her side. Whatever happened, she would not beg. She would not beg for her life, or for the codes, or for anything.
She let her mind run over the meeting she'd just had in town. After ditching her bodyguards again, she had gone to the city to meet up with a college classmate, a highly intelligent man, for some advice, hoping that he'd be able to help her track the code. After a week of trying herself until her eyes burned and her fingers hurt, that had been her last resort.
So, she'd vaguely explained the problem to the guy, hoping for some miraculous solution that had escaped her. There hadn’t been any. Due to the very nature of the codes, he had remarked that retrieving them wouldn’t be possible unless she happened to be in the proximity of fifty feet. And that was impossible because A. she didn't have the codes, and B. she didn't know where they were. Jackson had thought they were with the Outfit. And since The Outfit sons had come to her for help, she was pretty sure they didn't have it either.
Or maybe they did.
Maybe Tristan Caine did.
What if he did have the codes and was keeping it to himself for some reason? She'd seen him lie without batting an eyelash to his blood brother, and seen him try to scare her. What if he had, in fact, hired Jackson and falsely framed himself? What did she even know about the man to take his word for anything? From what she'd seen and heard, he was not what he seemed, besides an asshole.
The more she thought about it, the more certain Morana became that something was off with him. His entire threat to her had been for one reason and one reason only - he'd been trying to drive her away, and by running off, she'd given him exactly what he'd wanted. But the question was why? Why had he let her go from the Outfit party undiscovered? Why had he later found her with Dante, only to lie to him and kill Jackson? Why had he threatened her off if he hadn't wanted her help at all? What was his angle? What was he up to? And god forbid if he did have the codes, why pretend not to have them? Why send her and his own family on a wild goose chase? What could the codes even mean to him?
And, devil's advocate, if he didn't have the codes, then why run her off since she was his best chance of finding it?
What the hell did he want?
Damn it, the man was a book of blank pages written in invisible ink that she had no idea how to discover. So much information, so many answers in the book, and all she got was frustrated.
Sighing, Morana shook her head, removing the aggravating male who was number one on her hit list if she did live long enough to kill him. But she didn't have the luxury of focusing on him or his confounding hatred for her right now.
She had other things to focus on.
Like knocking on her father's door.
"Just get this over with," she muttered to herself, calling upon her courage. "You're not a coward. You are a genius who's created something equally amazing and terrifying. Just own up to it."
Thunder crackled outside, almost as though the skies were having a laugh at her expense. Her palms sweating as she raised her hand but stopped, hearing the voices inside.
“Does she know?” she recognized the accented voice of her father’s right-hand man, Tomas.
“No,” her father’s deep baritone replied. “And she never will.”
Who were they talking about?
“It’s for your daughter’s protection, I understand–”