Chapter 77: Password Noah

By dawn, Vittoria wanted me to choose between Gabriel's closed box and Noah's uninterrupted treatment. She had not touched either one. That was the cruelty of her leverage. It waited for me to make it real. I stood in the old media alcove with the phone that still held the May 12 image warm in my uninjured hand. Gabriel's cloud route rested on its dark screen. Across the gallery, Vittoria sat at the family table with the original ledger closed beneath her fingertips. At the pediatric glass, Maya kept watch. Noah slept on his side, his blanket bunched under his chin. Stable. Safe. Mine. The route was not the missing minute. It was not proof of who had broken my wedding or killed my father. It was one closed place Gabriel had kept beyond Moretti hands, and no one got to choose its first key but me. I took the cracked card from my coat with my burned hand. The wedding necklace followed, cold chain slipping over my knuckles. I did not play the card or open the clasp. I only held them long enough to remember what they had cost me. White camellias in the rain. Dante had put them in my arms before the vows. White petals against my wrist. His mouth close to my temple while he promised a future I had not known was already being sold around me. The memory hurt. It did not make him innocent. It did not make the route an answer. Noah's birthday was the first thing I could try. At three, he had leaned over a lopsided cake and whispered that our borrowed apartment was a castle. The Morettis had spent five years putting prices on his blood, his name, his future. I would not let a password turn that day into one more thing they owned. Vittoria's voice crossed the gallery. “Every second has a cost now, Elena.” I looked at Noah through the glass. Maya saw me and nodded once. I gave the route his birthday. My breath stopped over the last number. For one ugly second, I wondered whether Gabriel had hidden the truth behind the child they had marked before he was born. Then I pressed it. The screen went still. No archive opened. No recording played. Noah did not wake. Nothing about his care changed. The route had rejected the date. I tightened my burned hand around the phone until pain ran bright through my palm. The cost was not a lockout. It was the time I had spent offering my son's birthday to a secret that would not take it. “It isn't him,” I said. I would not give the route another piece of Noah. The dark screen changed once—not into the archive, not into an answer. At the edge of Gabriel's still-closed route, a small white flower appeared. Five clean petals. Nothing else. White camellias. The card and necklace went heavy in my other hand. The flower on the screen was not proof that Dante had known anything. It was not a way inside. It gave me only the next direction: the flowers he had carried to me before a wedding he had let die. Across the gallery, Vittoria's fingers stopped over the ledger. Not fear of the archive. Not yet. Confusion. She had expected Noah to open it. She had not expected Gabriel to leave me something that pointed past her. “You don't know it either,” I said. Her eyes lifted to mine. The small victory did not save Noah from dawn. It did not loosen Vittoria's threat or give me the missing minute. But for the first time since I had found Gabriel's route, there was one direction in this house that belonged to me before it belonged to her. Vittoria's hand closed over the original ledger. “Flowers fade,” she said. “Not before I find out why he chose them.” I went back to the pediatric glass and laid my uninjured hand against it. Noah slept on. Maya remained between him and every Moretti promise. The white camellia still waited on my phone, small and useless unless I made myself face the man who had given it to me. Before dawn, I would have to ask Dante what he remembered about the flowers.