Chapter 20 - The Silent Shadow
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That evening, a quiet peace rested over the grand estate.
Lily was asleep in her cozy bed, clutching her plush bear, while Emma and Alessandro sat in the ground-floor library sharing a glass of vintage red wine by the crackling fireplace.
Outside, a light evening mist rolled off the lake, coating the iron perimeter fence in tiny droplets of moisture.
At the far end of the property, near the quiet rear service gate that opened into the forest preserve, Marco was conducting his routine midnight sweep with two security guards.
His hand-held scanner was set to passive frequency detection—a habit he had developed since the night of the doll.
As Marco walked past the ancient stone archway of the rear gate, his scanner suddenly gave a single, faint BEEP.
Marco stopped dead in his tracks.
"Did you hear that?" he asked the guard beside him.
"No, sir. Just the wind in the trees."
Marco lowered his eyes to the digital screen.
The signal wasn't coming from inside the estate grounds, nor was it coming from a bugged toy or a hidden wiretap.
A high-frequency satellite pulse—encrypted with a unknown, top-tier foreign military algorithm—had just pinged the outer perimeter wall from somewhere deep inside the dark forest.
On the screen, a single line of text rendered automatically from the intercepted burst:
LOCATION CONFIRMED. TARGET MORETTI IS ALIVE. AWAITING ORDERS FROM MILAN.
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Marco’s blood went cold in his veins. He raised his tactical radio to his lips, his thumb pressing the talk button as he stared out into the pitch-black woods beyond the iron bars.
"Don Alessandro," Marco whispered into the radio, his voice trembling slightly in the night air. "We have a problem..."
