I managed to drag myself back to the bedroom. If there were any clothes I could wear in the dresser drawers, I didn't bother to look. I ripped off the towel I had wrapped around my body andcrawled naked under the duvet. My skin found comfort in the cool cotton, my hair soaking the pillow.
Before everything went dark, I heard his voice calling me from somewhere distant
‘Flower Girl...’
Chapter 20
Camillo Vicari
July, 2025
Silver River, South Mississippi, USA
Around six in the morning, I was awake. I hadn't known what a good night’s sleep was for a decade and was more than used to it. I showered quickly and got dressed, not wanting to waste too much time. There was a lot to do that day, so the sooner I started, the better.
I went down to the kitchen with my laptop. As soon as I sat down with an espresso in my hand, I followed the protocol. Scanned my right retina in front of the webcam lens, then my thumb on the tiny fingerprint reader, and finally entered the twenty-digit password verified on my phone. An intelligent man doesn’t repeat his mistakes, and I wanted to believe that I learned a lot from mine over the past ten years.
The device unlocked. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Alessandro Lombardi already sent me an email with an attachment labeled DAISY PARKER.
I opened the folder to find several files on the inside. I started with the one labeled DAISY PARKER – DETAILED and raised an eyebrow, unable to contain my surprise.
The daughter of a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier. Killed in combat when she was twelve. According to the investigation, the two had been inseparable. However, the same could not be said about Daisy’s mother.
It was written there that the woman had been unfaithful to Daisy’s father with a local police officer, to whom she was married to that day. Besides that, it appears she pressured her sister-in-law to sell her ex-husband's house after his death, so she could get her hands on her daughter's inheritance. The same inheritance she later used to open a flower shop. And most interestingly, put what was left of that money into an account in the name of her other daughter, the one she had with the police officer.
Daisy Parker was robbed by her own mother.
I washed down the bile that rose in my mouth with espresso, letting its pungent aroma rise to my nose. I couldn't imagine a mother being capable of such a thing.
I kept reading.
Daisy hadn't gone to college, and from what the report said, she hadn't even been a good student in high school. Lombardi'ssources had even cited school reports where the only thing missing was the teachers calling her stupid.
Dio.Could she really be that dumb? I would say naïve, clueless, zero sense of self preservation. But the little thing didn’t strike me as brainless, quite the opposite.
Moving on, I found what I already knew. The accident from twelve years ago. The collision between a train and a car that resulted in the death of Lester Fury, Senator Jones' only son. They left a note for me to look into the PICTURE RECORD file.
And so I did.
As soon as the document opened, I found a flood of pictures. In the first one there was a chubby baby with a big smile in the arms of a man I immediately knew was Daisy's father. He appeared to be tall in that picture, and was wearing a military uniform and had his head shaved, but his eyes… His eyes were identical to his daughters’. Features that even a picture couldn't mask. In fact, the resemblance between the two was striking.
That picture alone confirmed what the report had pointed out. The way the man held the baby, the pride spread across his face, made it clear how much he loved his baby girl. The woman next to him, however, with a round, flat nose and piercing brown eyes, made no effort to hide the fact that she didn’t want to be part of that reality.
I kept scrolling.
There were other pictures of Daisy as a little girl, chubby, with her honey-blonde hair tied in two pigtails, with her father always by her side, as if he was some kind of bastion against theworld. The report didn't go into more details about her father, but I had no doubt that he would have killed anyone who dared to threaten his little girl.
But wasn't that what any father would do?
I cleared my throat, my personal demons whispering in my ear what I already knew.
Any father, except me. I murdered my own son.
Pushing that inner voice into the depths of my mind, I was surprised when I found pictures of Daisy as a teenager. There were few, but they were enough for me to see how she had changed over the years.
In the pictures following her father’s passing, Daisy appeared as a chubby teenager with a sad look on her face and a careless appearance. Messy, oily hair, pale skin, clothes that didn't fit well. And there was nothing left of the smiling girl in pigtails.
In those pictures, there was no longer a father. But there was no mother either. The only human being that was present in them was an extremely attractive woman with long, curly hair, dressed with effortless, magnetic confidence. The caption under those pictures read ‘Elizabeth Alice Parker. Aunt’. Daisy looked happier in every one the woman was in.
