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30
CAYMAN
Reports from Nemesis arrived in close succession during my flight from Malta to Gatwick. Initially, much of what I read made no sense. Little by little, things were clarified. While certain facts remained unknown, the team was beginning to piece together the chain of events resulting in Charlene Vella-Borg going to work for Lorenzo “Mithras” Moretti.
Knowing Bexli would have questions, I took what I’d received and compiled it in chronological order, beginning the day the overheads confirmed Mithras had brought Bexli to Gozo—the fifteenth of October.
It was the same day Nemesis, Puck, and I had discovered one-hundred-and-twenty-four victims dead in two separate shipping containers that had arrived earlier at the Port of Purfleet.
Six days later, on the morning of twenty-one October, Selene Pavia, a twenty-three-year-old woman from Gozo, disappeared after leaving the apartment she shared with her boyfriend, Xavier Vella. The two lived in the city of Attard on the main island of Malta, less than one kilometer from the US embassy.
Vella filed a missing person report that evening, three hours after they were scheduled to travel together to visit Gozo for the weekend.
Knowing the Maltese police would not begin their search for Selene until she’d been unaccounted for longer than two days, Vella enlisted his friends and coworkers from the embassy to aid in his search efforts.
Fourteen days later, on four November, Vella returned to Gozo, where he stayed with his grandmother and aunt in the apartment above the Nonna Vella restaurant.
Xavier had been raised by the two women after his parents, Marco and Yasmine Vella, were killed in an automobile accident when their son was two years old. According to the most recent report I received, Charlene Vella-Borg had been married to Tommaso Borg for eighteen months before Xavier was born. The two divorced without having any children. Consequently, Xavier and his aunt were quite close.
On five November, Xavier and Charlene allegedly met with a woman who worked for Moretti. Thea Gafa and Vella-Borg were registered nurses who’d previously worked in the same department at Gozo General Hospital. According to Vella’s statement, the woman mentioned two significant things at the meeting. First, her boss was looking to hire one or two more nurses at a pay rate twice what Charlene made at the hospital.
More importantly, when Xavier asked, Ms. Gafa confirmed a woman matching Selene Pavia’s description had arrived at the villa on twenty-two October, the day after he’d reported his girlfriend missing.
On thirteen November, eight days after meeting with Gafa, Vella-Borg worked her first overnight shift at the villa. When she arrived home the next morning, she confirmed Xavier’s girlfriend was, in fact, being held prisoner on the property along with nineteen other women.
As terrified as she was to return the following evening, she did at Xavier’s insistence. Their aim was to devise a plan to rescue Ms. Pavia.
At twenty-one hundred hours on fourteen November, Vella-Borg entered the room where Bexli was being held, intending to administer a large enough dose of tranquilizer to ensure she would remain “unconscious” for the rest of the night. Her other duty, after injecting the drug, was to shackle the imprisoned woman’s hands and feet to her bed. Before she could complete either task, she heard a loud crash followed by several shouts of anger and a woman screaming. She rushed from Bexli’s room, unaware that in the process of doing so, she’d dropped the syringe containing the drug Bexli was supposed to have received.
She was met in the hallway by her friend Gafa, who said the woman she was looking for was the one being beaten.
According to Vella, Thea Gafa was terrified of what would happen if the owner of the villa or his guards discovered them outside the door where the beating was taking place. She led Vella-Borg down the back staircase, beyond the first floor, and to a basement. From there, the two exited the property via a secret underground passageway and hid at an unknown location until approximately zero eight hundred hours two days later.
While in hiding, Vella-Borg contacted her nephew and asked him to meet her. When he didn’t show up at the designated place and time, she risked returning to her apartment above the restaurant.
Also according to Xavier Vella, the hidden passageway was the same one he’d used to access the property earlier today when he put a bullet in the back of Mithras’ head, killing him instantly.
The reports seemed to clear up the question as to whether Vella-Borg had intentionally dropped the syringe Bexli used to incapacitate Mithras. However, many other unanswered questions remained.
Why had Bex run down that particular alleyway? Had it been as coincidental as was reported? I was still uncertain who had actually made the statement. Had it been Xavier or his aunt?
I rested my head against the seat, closing my eyes while I waited for the next report to arrive.
There was so much Bexli and I needed to discuss; it was hard to know where to begin. While we’d made love and admitted our feelings for each other, we hadn’t defined our relationship or what each of us wanted.
For me, it was easy. I wanted to marry Bexli and spend the rest of my life with her. It’s what I’d always wanted, going back as far as the day we’d met, as ridiculous as it sounded.
I wouldn’t push, though. Not now. There was every chance her attachment to me was a result of what she’d gone through in the last two months. She had a long road of recovery ahead of her, whether she yet knew it or not.
Beyond talking about our relationship, Bexli had also not given a detailed accounting of what happened between the time she left for Milan and the day I found her in Nonna Vella’s apartment. That in itself might throw a wrench into the plan I’d started formulating.
I hadn’t yet received another update from Nem and doubted I would tonight. Since my parents were both night owls, often staying awake past midnight, I rang them to fill them in on an idea I had.
My intention was to take Bexli to our family’s private island in the Caymans. The location offered several things necessary for her safety. It was only accessible by boat or helicopter, and even then, the areas a watercraft could navigate to come ashore were limited.
Security was already tight, but when I told my father I wanted to increase it, he didn’t balk.
“By all means, son,” he said. “I’ll get started on it straight away.” His response shouldn’t have come as a surprise. My parents had always been good about helping me in any way they could, just like they’d been willing to do when I asked about liquidating assets in order to bid on Bexli in the auction. Looking back on it, it was easy to see how misguided my thinking had been at the time.
