Chapter 7 - The Night Roman Disappeared
Roman remembered gunfire.
Concrete.
Glass exploding beside his face.
Then darkness.
He woke in a private hospital under another name.
His security team feared a second attempt.
Helena took control.
No visitors except approved personnel.
No public announcement.
No contact with Nora.
That last part had supposedly been for safety.
Now Roman questioned everything.
During recovery, he repeatedly asked for Nora.
Helena always had an answer.
Nora was frightened.
Nora blamed him.
Nora wanted distance.
Eventually Helena showed him messages.
Roman still had screenshots.
He gave them to investigators.
The messages looked like Nora’s.
Same profile photo.
Same writing style.
But telecommunications records showed Nora’s number had never sent them.
The account was spoofed through an internet messaging service.
Payment for that service came from one of Vincent’s corporate cards.
Vincent admitted setting it up.
Helena dictated several messages.
Others he wrote himself.
Roman closed his eyes.
Three years of grief had been manufactured sentence by sentence.
Nora experienced the mirror image.
After Helena told her Roman died, Nora demanded proof.
Helena showed her a death notice prepared through a private legal office.
It was never filed with the state.
But Nora had no reason to understand the difference.
Then Helena told her the body could not be released because of the security circumstances surrounding Roman’s work.
Nora attended a private memorial.
There was an urn.
It contained no Roman.
Helena staged a funeral for a living man.
Roman almost laughed when investigators told him.
Not because it was funny.
Because the scale of it felt unreal.
Why not simply tell Nora Roman wanted to leave?
Because Nora would have searched.
Called friends.
Gone to his companies.
A death stopped questions differently.
At the same time, telling Roman that Nora had abandoned him protected Helena from the opposite direction.
Both believed the other was gone.
Both stopped reaching eventually.
Then Bellweather’s former operations manager agreed to speak.
He remembered Helena’s route review.
He said something had always bothered him.
Helena requested raw security maps, not merely recommendations.
He refused initially.
Then Vincent sent written authorization supposedly from Roman.
The signature looked real.
Roman had never signed it.
Another forgery.
The raw maps were delivered.
Six days later, Roman was attacked.
The operations manager also remembered receiving a call after the ambush.
Helena demanded all copies of the review be destroyed because the information was now sensitive.
One employee ignored the order.
He kept an archived backup.
That backup showed someone accessed the files twice from an IP address inside the D’Angelo mansion.
Once by Vincent.
Once from Helena’s personal study.
Still, access did not prove Helena gave the route to the attackers.
Then Vincent made another decision.
He asked for a prosecutor.
There was something he had hidden even from his first written confession.
A payment.
Cash.
Made the day before Roman was attacked.
Vincent delivered it personally.
Not to the shooters.
May you like
To an intermediary.
And Helena had sent him.
