THE GREENHOUSE DOOR WAS UNLOCKED LONG BEFORE WE ARRIVED

“What do you mean, moved?” I gripped the phone so tightly my knuckles ached. “My father is paralyzed on his left side. He can’t even sit up!”

“A private transfer team arrived ten minutes ago,” the nurse explained, her voice frantic. “They had signed authorization forms claiming to be arranged by his primary sponsor. But when I checked the signatures, they didn’t match your file. Security stopped them at the elevator, but the team abandoned the stretcher and ran.”

“I’m coming right now,” I choked out, hanging up.

Luca was already standing. He had heard every word in the quiet, echoing greenhouse.

“Take my car,” he said, tossing me a set of heavy black keys. “Marco is waiting by the front steps. Tell him to drive you. He won’t stop for red lights.”

“I can’t ask you to—”

“Go, Emma.”

I ran. I left the prune cake on a wooden potting bench and sprinted back across the lawn.

When I burst through the hospital doors twenty minutes later, Marco, Luca’s head of security, was right behind me. We found my father safely back in his bed, looking confused and exhausted.

“Emma-bear,” he mumbled, his speech still slightly slurred from the stroke. “People in suits… said I was going to a better place.”

I held his good hand, pressing it to my cheek. “You’re staying right here, Dad. You’re safe.”

I stepped out into the hallway to speak with the charge nurse. She handed me a clipboard.

“These are the transfer documents they left behind,” she said.

I scanned the paperwork. The transfer was ordered to a private, off-the-books palliative care facility fifty miles outside the city. It wasn’t a hospital. It was a hospice. A place where people were sent to fade away without questions.

At the bottom of the page was the signature of the authorizing sponsor.

Vanessa Bellini.

Bile rose in my throat. Vanessa had paid for a few of my father’s early physical therapy sessions as a “charitable tax write-off” when she first moved into the mansion. It gave her legal standing as a financial sponsor on his medical files.

But why would she try to kidnap my father tonight?

I flipped to the second page of the transfer order. A small, glossy rectangle slipped from between the stapled sheets and fluttered to the linoleum floor.

I bent down and picked it up.

It was an old Polaroid photograph. The edges were yellowed, the colors muted by time.

It showed my father, twenty-six years younger, standing in a lush, blooming greenhouse. He was wearing a gardener’s apron. And in his arms, he was holding a beautiful, dark-haired woman who was laughing as she kissed his cheek.

It was Luca’s mother.

“What the hell?” I whispered.

My father had never been a gardener. He was an accountant. And he had certainly never worked for the Moretti family.

Before I could process it, heavy footsteps echoed down the corridor.

Luca walked into the cardiac ward. He looked entirely out of place in his tailored engagement tuxedo, his dark eyes scanning the room until they locked onto me.

“Is he safe?” Luca asked, coming to a stop in front of me.

“He’s fine,” I said, my voice shaking. “Security stopped them. Luca… Vanessa ordered the transfer. She was trying to move him to a hospice.”

Luca’s jaw tightened. “She’s trying to clear the board. She knows we found the greenhouse.”

“But why my dad?” I asked, holding up the Polaroid. “And why does she have this?”

Luca took the photograph. All the color drained from his face. He stared at the image of his mother laughing in my father’s arms.

“Where did you get this?” he demanded, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper.

“It was tucked into the fake transfer papers Vanessa’s men left behind. Luca, my father didn’t know your mother. He was an accountant for the city. He never worked in your greenhouse.”

Luca flipped the photo over.

There, in faded blue ink, was a date: October 14th.

The day Luca’s mother died.

“Emma,” Luca said slowly, looking up at me. “Who told you your father was an accountant?”

“He did,” I said, stepping back. “He worked for the city until he retired. He has the tax forms, the pension…”

“Look at his hands in this picture,” Luca said, pointing to the photograph.

I looked closely. My father’s hands in the picture were stained with dark soil, his knuckles rough and calloused. Just like Mr. Petrov’s.

“Viktor Petrov isn’t eighty years old,” Luca said quietly. “He’s only sixty-five. And he didn’t start working for my family thirty years ago.”

“What are you saying?”

Luca looked toward my father’s hospital room. “I’m saying the man sitting in my house tonight isn’t Viktor Petrov. I haven’t seen the real Viktor Petrov since I was seven years old.”

He held up the photograph, pointing at my father’s smiling face.