Chapter 2 - THE BLOODLINE LIEThe armored SUV cut through the pouring rain of the East Coast highway like a phantom.
Inside the darkened cabin, the only lights came from the glowing tactical monitors and the steady beep of a portable heart rate tracker attached to my wrist. Grace sat in the row behind me, carefully wrapping fresh medical gauze around my torn stitches, while Lucas lay asleep on her lap, his small hand clutched tightly around the silver cross.
Matteo was driving, his knuckles white against the leather steering wheel.
“Read it to me again,” I commanded, my eyes fixed on the rain-streaked window.
Matteo swallowed hard, glancing at the blood-stained note sitting on the center console. “Dominic... if Elena’s note is genuine, then Vanessa Bellini isn't Vittorio’s biological child. She was born twenty-two years ago, during the ceasefire war between the Moretti family and the Bellini syndicate.”
“My father had a mistress,” I rasped, the pieces of a twenty-year nightmare finally clicking together with sickening clarity. “Before he was assassinated, he spent three months in the safehouse in Boston. Vittorio didn't adopt Vanessa out of charity. He took my father’s illegitimate daughter, raised her as a Bellini, and presented her to me as a peace offering.”
“To keep the bloodline tied to his syndicate,” Grace interrupted from the back seat, her tone calm, analytical, and devoid of fear. “If you married Vanessa, the entire Moretti empire would legally and genetically merge with the Bellinis. But if you had a biological heir with Elena Rossi... that child was a threat to everything Vittorio built.”
I turned my head to look at the nurse. She didn't look like a hospital worker anymore. The quiet, tired woman in stained scrubs was speaking with the cold logic of an intelligence officer.
“Who are you, Grace?” I asked softly.
Grace paused in wrapping my arm, her brown eyes meeting mine in the rear-view mirror. “My name is Grace Bennett, Mr. Moretti. I spent four years as a combat trauma nurse in Fallujah before I took a shift at St. Jude’s. I know what a cover-up looks like. And I know what men like Vittorio Bellini do to people who see too much.”
“Why didn't you walk away?” I pressed, leaning back against the leather headrest as a spike of pain shot through my ribs. “You could have let security drag you out. You could have saved your own skin.”
Grace looked down at Lucas, gently smoothing the dark curls from his forehead. “Seven years ago, a pregnant woman came into my field clinic in Chicago with bullet wounds and a wiped medical file. I delivered her baby in secret. She told me if anything ever happened to her, I had to find Dominic Moretti.”
My breath caught in my throat. The cabin went dead silent save for the hum of the engine.
“Elena...” I whispered. “You delivered Lucas?”
“Yes,” Grace murmured. “Elena didn't die in that car fire, Dominic. Vittorio kept her locked in a private psychiatric facility outside New Haven for six years, using her as leverage to keep the Rossi family in line. Three months ago, she escaped with Lucas. She was trying to reach you when Vittorio’s men cornered them in that warehouse.”
“And the explosion?”
“Elena threw Lucas out of the second-story window into a dumpster right before the fuel tanks detonated,” Grace said, a single, cold tear slipping down her cheek. “She was still inside when the roof collapsed.”
I slammed my fist into the door panel, the heavy steel denting beneath my knuckles. The rage inside me was a living, breathing beast, tearing at my insides, drowning out the physical agony of my burns.
Elena was dead. Really dead this time. Killed by the same family that had tried to hand me my own half-sister as a bride.
“Matteo,” I growled, my voice dropping into an icy register. “Where is Vanessa right now?”
“She’s at the Bellini estate in Long Island,” Matteo replied, pulling up a live satellite tracker on the console. “Vittorio called an emergency meeting of the Five Families for eight o’clock tomorrow morning. He’s going to announce that you are brain-dead from the explosion, invoke the emergency proxy clause in the alliance contract, and crown Vanessa as the interim head of the Moretti syndicate.”
May you like
A dark, terrifying smile touched my lips.
“He wants a coronation?” I whispered, checking the magazine of my SIG Sauer pistol and slapping it back into the well with a sharp, metallic CLACK. “Then let’s make sure the groom arrives in time for the wedding.”
