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“Okay, here goes.” I push the back door open—
And silence. The battery’s dead. I toss the lockpicks up and down in my hand as I swagger through the door into a sparkling, expensive kitchen. People shouldn’t make this so easy. “Okay, princess, where now?”
“The basement.”
Suddenly, all the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.
Chiara shoots me a tense, apologetic look as she heads past me, down the hall and over to a door. She opens it and there’s only darkness beyond.
My stomach’s suddenly churning and I’m rooted to the spot, which is ridiculous as Chiara never saw the basement where our sisters were killed. She doesn’t know more about that basement than what I told her. Does she?
“Did you watch those videos?” I demand. “Tell me the truth. Why this basement?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t even know where you keep those videos. I suddenly had a feeling and a few things connected in my mind. I thought we should find out for sure. Please don’t be angry with me if I’m wrong.”
“Of course I won’t be angry.” As much as I want to find out who killed our sisters, I feel an almost overwhelming desire to bolt out the back door and never look back. Whatever gut feeling Chiara has, I hope in a few minutes we’ll be laughing it off.
I want to go home.
I want to be anywhere but here.
With a grim expression, Cassius moves past me and shines the light through the doorway as he begins to descend. Chiara tries to follow him but I grab her arm.
“Stay behind me,” I mutter and pass through the door. The steps are steep and it’s a long way down. “Hold onto the rail and be careful,” I tell her over my shoulder.
Ahead of me, Cassius’s back is blocking my view. At the bottom of the steps, he moves aside and passes the flashlight beam over the walls—and I feel like someone’s punched me in the guts. I step forward, and my ears are filled with terrified screaming. Women beg for their lives and make pitiful, inhuman noises.
Memories hit me like a tidal wave. I stagger back, fall on my ass and sit there, one arm raised in front of my face and panting for breath. Slowly, I lower my arm and take another look. The patterns made by the different shades of brick in the walls. The narrow vent up by the ceiling. The slightly askew light fitting. Every detail is the same. Useless fucking information that I branded into my mind along with our sisters’ torture, hoping in vain that I might recognize something. Discover something. Doanythingwith the nightmares I witnessed, again and again.
Someone crouches down beside me and touches my arm. “Lorenzo?”
I get to my feet and move back a pace, and then to the left. “Here. This is where the camera must have been positioned.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine, as if I’ve been half-strangled. I look around wildly and see the door. “He always entered from the right. There was a…” I move my arm back and forth, remembering how the table looked, four feet high and human-sized. Long enough to fit a man. Or woman.
“There was a chair,” I say, my voice reaching my ears from a long way away.
I can see the ropes binding my sister to the chair, her blonde hair tangled and falling over her shoulder. Her tear-stained and mascara-streaked face and the terror in her eyes. Terror and total confusion. She didn’t understand why any of this was happening to her and her captor never bothered to explain. Maybe Sienna went to her death never knowing why, or maybe in her heart of hearts, she knew.
She was tortured and killed because of me.
“Is this the place?” Cassius demands, his voice rough with emotion. “Were they killed here?”
The walls still hold the echo of their screams. The air is dank with their misery. I can smell their blood in the concrete. “This is where our sisters were killed.”
Chiara moans. “I didn’t want to be right. This isn’t the man I knew. This isn’t the face he showed to everyone.”
“Bambina, whose house is this?”
“Mom and I came here the summer after your sisters were murdered. It rained all week and Nicole and I were bored. There was nothing to do but play hide and seek. The basement door was always locked and I was told never to come down here, but one day I tried the handle, and it opened.” Her eyes grow unfocused at the memory. “The smell. I was too young to know what it was, but I know now. It was death. There was something terrifying about his face when he found me down here. Just for a second, he looked like a monster. Something out of a nightmare. I was only ten years old and you’re full of make-believe when you’re ten, and I told myself I’d imagined it. I forgot all about that day until just before when Nicole and I were reminiscing. Do you remember what we talked about, Lorenzo? I thought that the man who murdered your sisters was a doctor, or someone medical. While I was going through all the cold cases Vinicius dug up, I thought to myself, this killer must travel a lot. He must have a good excuse to be away from home so often.”
Chiara takes a deep breath and looks around the basement.
“The man who owns this house is a medical researcher. He travels all the time for medical conferences. He knows Dad. He’s areallygood friend of Dad’s and he has been for years. To look at him, he seems weak and harmless, but I saw who he really was the day he found me in this basement. I saw the monster in his eyes.”
My fists clench so hard that my nails cut into my flesh. “Who is it?”
She swallows hard, and whispers, “Mr. De Luca.”
Just outside the door, there’s the sound of a footfall. For a split second, we all freeze and Cassius and I stare at each other in horror as we realize what we’ve done. We’ve brought Chiara to a serial killer’s house.
