Chapter 7 - THE ASHES OF NINETY-EIGHT
Leo kicked the wrought-iron gate open and rushed inside, immediately putting himself between Emily and the bolted coal chute door while Anthony kept his weapon trained on a sobbing, writhing Vanessa on the floor.
"Are you hurt?" Leo asked breathlessly, his hands checking Emily’s shoulders before gently touching little Sofia’s dark curls. "Are you okay, little one?"
Sofia peeked out from Emily’s neck, looking at the tall waiter who looked so much like her beloved Emmy. "You have Emmy’s teeth," Sofia whispered through her hiccups.
Leo let out a shaky, warm laugh, his eyes shining. "Yeah, sweetheart. I do. And nobody’s ever going to scare you in this house again."
Salvatore walked heavily into the vault. He looked like a man who had aged twenty years in thirty minutes. He barely glanced at the forty million dollars in bearer bonds sitting in the leather duffels. Instead, he looked down at Vanessa, who was cradling her broken wrist and glaring up at them with pure venom.
"My men are already stationed behind the garage outside the coal chute," Anthony told Salvatore calmly. "Dominic’s walking right into a wall of Chicago steel. He won't make it to the driveway."
"Bring him back alive, Anthony," Salvatore said, his voice hollow and broken. "He’s my blood. God forgive me, he’s my blood. What I do with him will be done according to the old laws."
Emily set Sofia gently down into her mother Margaret’s waiting arms at the vault doorway. "Take her upstairs to the kitchen, Mom. Make her some hot cocoa with the little marshmallows. Don't let her see the rest of this."
Margaret nodded, kissing Emily’s forehead fiercely before carrying the child up the stairs.
Once Sofia was out of sight, Emily knelt on the cold stone floor and picked up the fire-scorched metal box Dominic had kicked to her feet. The edges were blackened with old soot—soot from the house fire in Ohio six years ago.
The latch was broken. Emily lifted the lid.
Inside were no jewels, no bearer bonds, and no money.
Resting on a bed of charred velvet was an old VHS cassette tape labeled Mercy General Security - Oct 14, 1998, a gold St. Christopher medal on a broken chain, and a stack of photographs taken over the last decade.
Leo knelt beside his sister, picking up the photographs. His breath caught.
They were surveillance photos of Leo in the Newark foster home. Photos of Emily walking home from school in Ohio. Photos of Margaret working double shifts at the clinic. And printed on the back of every single photograph was a chilling, typed warning sent to Dominic:
Pay the monthly installment, or the twins get a visit. — F.C.
"Dominic wasn't gambling in Brighton Beach," Leo whispered, looking up at Vanessa in stunned disbelief. "Frank Calabrese was extorting him."
"Wait," Salvatore stepped closer, taking the stack of photos from Leo’s hand. "Why would Frank extort Dominic using Anthony’s children? Dominic wanted them gone to protect his inheritance!"
"Look at the St. Christopher medal, Uncle Sal," Emily said softly, lifting the broken gold chain from the box.
Salvatore took the medal. He turned it over. Engraved on the back was: To my son Dominic, on his First Communion, 1984.
"Margaret," Anthony called up toward the cellar stairs, though his eyes were fixed on the scorched box. "In ninety-eight, when Rosa came to the hospital in North Carolina with a twenty-two-year-old Dominic... how did they get Leo out past hospital security?"
From the top of the stairs, Grandma Rosa’s frail voice answered. She was standing by the open door, leaning on the arm of one of the captains, looking down into the cellar like a ghost peering into purgatory.
"Dominic didn't want to hurt the baby," Rosa said, her voice echoing off the brick walls. "When Frank Calabrese found out Margaret had delivered twins, Frank drove down to North Carolina himself to finish what he failed to do in 1986. He was going to kill Margaret and both infants in their sleep."
Salvatore stared up at his mother. "And Dominic?"
"Dominic was twenty-two. He wasn't a monster yet," Rosa wept. "He went into that nursery ahead of Frank, wrapped little Leo in his own coat—where he kept his St. Christopher medal—and carried the boy out the fire escape to me. We hid Leo in Newark to save his life from Frank! Dominic told Frank the boy had died of a heart defect and been cremated by the state!"
The revelation flipped everything they had believed upside down.
Dominic hadn't stolen Leo out of greed. At twenty-two, terrified of Frank Calabrese and desperate to stop a double infanticide, Dominic had actually saved Leo’s life—and when Frank discovered the truth years later, Frank had used that mercy to blackmail Dominic for millions, forcing Dominic to steal from Salvatore and eventually trapping him in a marriage to Vanessa to keep Leo and Emily alive.
"That’s why Dominic hired me three years ago," Emily whispered, her hand covering her mouth as the memories rushed back. "It wasn't HR that approved my application without a background check. Dominic signed off on it himself. He brought me into this house where Frank couldn't touch me without starting a war with Uncle Sal!"
Down on the floor, Vanessa let out a bitter, jagged laugh through her pain. "You’re all so pathetic! My father should have wiped the whole Bellini bloodline out in eighty-six! You’re weak! Sentimental fools!"
Suddenly, two sharp gunshots rang out from outside the house, near the back garage.
BANG. BANG.
Every person in the cellar froze.
Salvatore’s heart stopped. "Dominic!" the old man gasped, stumbling toward the bolted coal chute door.
The heavy iron latch on the inside of the coal chute suddenly scraped back. The steel door creaked open an inch, then swung wide.
Standing in the dark coal tunnel wasn't Dominic.
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It was Frank Calabrese. Blood was soaking through the shoulder of his suit jacket where he had overpowered one of the guards upstairs, and in his right hand, he held a heavy Chrome .45 pressed firmly against the temple of a bleeding, beaten Dominic.
"Drop the guns, Sal!" Frank roared, dragging Dominic into the vault room as a human shield. "Or you watch your only son die right here on the stones!"
