Blood on the envelope

“Knock knock!”

Rico knocked on Diego Rossi’s door, his knuckles sharp and urgent against the thick mahogany.

“Who is there?” came Diego’s groggy voice, husky with sleep.

“It’s Rico.” He didn’t wait for permission to enter. Time wasn’t on their side.

Rico, the eldest bodyguard in the Rossi household — a man pushing sixty with graying temples and an ever-sharp gaze — had served Diego since the beginning. He wasn’t one to panic easily. But tonight, something had shifted in the air.

Diego Rossi, head of the Rossi empire, sat up in bed, bare-chested and confused, his pajama trousers rumpled from sleep. “What’s going on?”

“We have a problem,” Rico said, stepping in. “Two of our guards were found unconscious by the front door.”

“What?!” Diego’s feet hit the floor. He pulled on his shirt as he spoke, already moving. “An intruder?”

“I think so. But nothing’s been taken. The documents are intact. No alarms, no gunfire. I think the rain masked their entry.” Rico followed him as they exited the room and walked down the dim hallway. The silence in the house wasn’t peaceful — it was thick. Suffocating.

Diego’s steps slowed as they passed by a familiar door — Marco’s room. The door was ajar.

“Marco always shuts his door,” Diego murmured, his brows furrowed.

Without a word, Rico drew his gun, raising it carefully. “I’ll go first.”

He approached slowly, his footfalls silent, and nudged the door open with the barrel of the weapon.

“Marco?” Diego called softly.

No response.

Rico moved in calculated steps. The room was quiet… too quiet. The storm outside lashed against the windows, the only sound.

Diego pushed the door fully open and froze. The chair was empty. A book lay face-down on the floor — Othello, its pages bent and soaking in the dampness from an open window.

A chill crawled down Diego’s spine.

“Marco!” His voice broke the silence like a whip.

Rico checked behind the curtains, the closet, the bathroom — nothing.

“He’s not here,” Rico confirmed grimly.

“Marco!” Diego’s shout thundered down the hallway. Doors opened, lights flipped on, footsteps thundered as the household awakened in a panic.

“Marco is missing!” Rico shouted to the incoming guards. “Search the grounds! Every room!”

“I need my son. Now,” Diego growled, his voice cracking under pressure. He looked ready to collapse, but Rico steadied him with a hand to the shoulder.

The mansion became chaos. Guards spread like ants, flashlights sweeping through the corridors and the garden beyond. Rain poured like judgment from the heavens.

Diego shook off Rico’s hand and stomped toward the stairs. “Find him! I want him found before the hour ends!”

From the top of the staircase came a different voice — cool, unbothered, dismissive.

“What the hell is this chaos?” Leonard Rossi stood barefoot in designer lounge pants and a black shirt, hair tousled, his face sharp with annoyance. He descended the stairs slowly, as if the urgency didn’t reach him.

“Marco is missing,” Martin, Leonard’s personal guard, reported.

Leonard paused. “What?”

“He’s not in his room,” Diego snapped. “And two guards were knocked out. What the hell does that sound like to you?” “They should’ve taken the documents and left Marco alone." Diego said with clear panic.

It’s probably another one of his disappearing acts.” Leonard scoffed.

“Relax,” Leonard said again with a lazy smirk. “You know how dramatic he can be. Always off reading in the garden or sulking in the library.”

Diego turned on him, eyes blazing. “It’s two in the morning, Leo! He’s gone. I can feel it.”

Leonard raised a brow, his casual posture unfazed. “Why so emotional? He’s not a kid.”

“Your father is worried, and rightly so,” Rico interjected. “We need to focus on finding Marco.”

Leonard exhaled sharply, irritated. “Fine. Whatever.”

But before he could say more, the front doors burst open with a gust of rain and wind. A guard ran in, drenched from head to toe, water dripping from his chin, eyes wide with urgency.

“Did you find him?” Diego barked.

The guard didn’t speak. He just held something out in his shaking hand — an envelope.

“What are you…?” Diego took a step forward and stopped. The envelope was stained red.

Blood.

Diego’s heart dropped.

He snatched the envelope and tore it open, his eyes scanning the short message inside. The words hit like a bullet to the chest.

"You want to take what’s ours. Now we take what’s yours.

– Alessandro De Luca"

Silence consumed the room.

Leonard stepped forward and took the letter from his father’s trembling hands. His face darkened as he read the words.

“Alessandro?” he whispered, voice suddenly void of sarcasm. “That devil... how dare he.”

Rico lowered his weapon slowly, but his jaw clenched. Diego stood frozen, fingers still curled in the air where the letter had been, his mind racing.

The blood on the envelope. The letter. The message.

It was real.

Marco was gone.

Not missing.

Taken.

And Alessandro De Luca had drawn first blood.

Leonard’s smirk had long since vanished. He folded the letter with slow, tight hands.

“That bastard wants war,” he said through clenched teeth.

Diego looked up, fire in his eyes despite the horror.

“No,” he said. “He already started one.”