Chapter 3 - The Little Observer
Chapter 3 - The Little Observer
Lily was officially adopted by Adrian Moretti within forty-eight hours. Marcus handled the legal paperwork, ensuring that Adrian’s guardianship was airtight.
To the rest of the Moretti crime syndicate, the adoption was viewed as a dying man’s pathetic attempt to find comfort before his inevitable end. Adrian was growing weaker by the week. His speech was slurred in the mornings, and he spent most of his time sitting in the sunroom, gazing blankly into the garden.
Lily moved into a bedroom on the second floor—the room right across from Adrian’s master suite.
Unlike other children who might have been terrified by the stoic guards carrying concealed weapons in the hallways, Lily moved through the mansion like a silent shadow. She observed everything.
She noticed that the security guards never checked Marcus’s leather briefcase when he entered the house, even though they searched every package, food delivery, and medical supply truck that arrived at the gate.
She noticed that Dr. Vance always prepared Adrian’s liquid afternoon medication himself, pouring it from a brown glass vial into a small paper cup, never allowing the head maid or the nurses to handle it.
And most importantly, she noticed the smell.
Lily had a remarkably sharp sense of smell. Her father had worked with chemicals in a textile factory before becoming an accountant, and he had taught her to identify distinct odors.
Every afternoon at two o’clock, Dr. Vance would enter Adrian’s room with the blue-and-white capsules and a small glass of water. Afterward, Adrian’s eyes would grow glassy, his voice would become thick, and he would fall into a deep, unnerving sleep that lasted until nightfall.
One afternoon, three weeks after her arrival, Lily was sitting on the rug in Adrian’s study, drawing pictures with crayons on a sheet of construction paper.
Adrian was slumped in his wheelchair, his head tilted back, sleeping heavily after taking his afternoon dose. Dr. Vance had just left the room, leaving the empty paper cup on the side table.
Lily stood up on tiptoe and picked up the paper cup. She brought it to her nose and sniffed.
It smelled faintly of bitter almonds and stale copper—a smell she remembered from her father’s old work chemicals. It was not the sweet syrup smell of regular medicine.
Lily set the cup down. She walked over to Adrian’s wheelchair, reached out, and gently touched his wrist.
His skin was clammy and ice-cold. She looked at his hands. His fingers were dark blue around the fingernails.
Lily ran back to her room, pulled her small backpack from under her bed, and pulled out a small leather-bound notebook that her father had given her before he went to the hospital. Inside the notebook were lines of numbers, bank account figures, and names written in her father’s frantic, shaky handwriting.
Her father’s last words to her rushed back into her memory: “Lily, if anything happens to me, you go to Mr. Moretti. But don’t trust the man with the silver watch. The man with the silver watch is selling the ledger.”
Lily flipped open the notebook. On the very last page, her father had taped a tiny, folded piece of paper containing a list of chemical compounds and a bank transfer routing number.
That evening, when Marcus came to the estate to deliver papers for Adrian to sign, Lily stood near the doorway of the study.
Marcus leaned over Adrian’s desk, placing a pen in Adrian’s trembling hand. As Marcus raised his arm to adjust his cuff, his sleeve pulled back.
On his wrist sat a custom-made, antique silver Patek Philippe watch.
Lily’s heart pounded against her ribs. She pressed herself against the doorframe, her tiny fingers digging into the wood.
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Marcus Vale was the man her father had warned her about.
And Marcus was the one who personally brought Dr. Vance to the mansion every single week.
