Page 58 of Blue in the Deep Blue Sea

“Just a month later, she killed herself.”

He set the gun on the desk and folded his arms.

“She opened the art gallery we used to smuggle the paintings. Valuable pieces came in, she’d copy them, the copies were either returned or left hanging in the gallery, and we sold the originals on the black market.”

A quiet chuckle escaped him as his fingers pinched the bridge of his nose.

“We already had buyers lined up for two of them. Caravaggio’sNativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrenceand Rembrandt’sChrist in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee. Instead of the originals, I received flawless copies.”

His gaze locked onto mine.

“The originals she hid are somewhere on Li Galli.”

His words came one after another, and the whole world I had built so carefully began to crumble. Everything I thought I knew slipped through my fingers. The last memories of my mother gave way to the truth of who she really was, and this new version of her was someone I couldn’t bring myself to love.

I lost her when I was very young. Almost every image of her disappeared from my mind, and the ones that were gone I tried to replace with an image I created myself. A loving mother who smiled as she painted in the garden, who breathed in the scent of the blue hydrangeas I brought her with her morning coffee. But now that image splintered apart, each piece sinking to the bottom of my mind.

The memories I had buried were the ones I truly remembered all along.

The paintings she did in the garden belonged to the Bianchi family. The morning coffee I carried to her was accepted with tears already filling her eyes. She would sit by the window, staring out at the sea while silent tears slipped down her face. One by one, she placed each blue hydrangea into the vase beside her bed without ever lifting them to her face to smell them.

She had lost herself long before I lost her.

She had lived with depression for a long time. I had seen the marks on her hands. It wasn’t the first time she had tried to end her life. It was only the first time she had succeeded.

For years, I thought she had been selfish, that she had done it for herself. But now I know she couldn’t see another way to leave my father and me except through death.

The truth was heartbreaking.

Sometimes people live with danger for so long, even the danger inside themselves, that they stop moving altogether. They keep swallowing the pain, holding it in, day after day, until there’s no room left for anything else. My mother stood in that place for years, carrying everything alone until one day she simply couldn’t carry it anymore.

It took me a long time to understand that.

It was always easier to blame everyone else than to blame her. Because I knew that if I truly allowed myself to blame my mother, everything I had built inside myself would come crashing down. Every wall would collapse, and I would lose her all over again, just as I had when I was a ten-year-old boy, wrapped around my mother’s lifeless body, waiting for her to wake up.

I just stared at him blankly while he kept rambling.

“Your father was nothing compared to her. She was the mastermind, and we did everything the way she planned. It was never the same after she was gone.” He laughed. “But luckily for us, George’s daughter, Viola, found a map that leads me to more gold and those exact paintings, and your idiot father handed it over in exchange for a partnership.”

Of course.

I took a slow breath.

My father had never intended to leave the business to me. He only wanted me as far away from him as possible so I would never get tangled in his dirty secrets and lies. What he hadn’tknown was that the brother of his secret partner in crime had boarded my yacht.

And he had been right. I wanted to be as far away from all of this as possible. Now I was even questioning the last name I carried. I wanted to tear it away from myself.

The anger boiling inside me surged into my clenched fists. Veins rose beneath the skin of my forearms until they burned. Every muscle in my body screamed at me to beat them both into the floor. But the only two people on this ship I could truly trust wouldn’t be safe if I did, so I forced myself to stay still.

With every word that left his mouth, the storm grew louder. Thunder rolled across the sky, shaking the ship beneath our feet, while rain hammered harder and harder against the windows. And those two fucking old fools who thought they had balls of steel, paid no attention to what was building behind their backs.

The feeling settled deep in my gut.

I knew exactly what was about to happen.

Then I saw it.

A twelve-metre rogue wave rose out of the horizon, towering above the sea as it gathered itself and charged straight toward us.