Chapter 4 - THE COTTAGE ON ELM STREET AND THE RED VELVET COAT
"Get the car, Enzo," Dante said into his lapel comm.
Two minutes later, we weren't waiting for explanations from Marco or Camilla. Dante had locked both of them inside the estate’s reinforced security office under the watch of four armed guards, while he carried his eighty-year-old mother in his own arms out to the heated backseat of his armored Maybach.
I sat facing them on the rear jump seat, my heart hammering against my ribs as the heavy sedan tore through the rain-slicked streets of suburban Oak Park toward the old industrial border of Elm Street.
Across from me, Carmela sat wrapped in her faded blue quilt and Dante’s suit jacket, her frail hands resting over Dante’s knuckles.
Dante hadn't spoken a single word since we pulled out of the Lake Forest gates. He just stared down at the tiny silver St. Christopher medal inside his father's broken watch.
I knew that medal. Not because I had seen it in the DeLuca mansion, but because my mother had a matching silver chain in her jewelry box at home—given to her by my father the night before he vanished.
"Mrs. DeLuca," I said softly over the hum of the rain against the bulletproof glass. "Camilla said my father died three years ago at the cottage. Why did my mother write her name on the back of last Tuesday's electric bill?"
Carmela lifted her tear-stained eyes to mine. "Because your mother goes to 414 Elm Street every Tuesday morning after her five A.M. dialysis session, sweetheart. She’s the one who cooks the soup and checks the tutor's lessons."
I stared at her, completely stunned. "My mother can barely walk two blocks without getting winded. Every Tuesday morning, she tells me our neighbor Mrs. Gable drives her to the church prayer circle in Berwyn."
"Mrs. Gable is my late sister's cousin, Clara," Carmela said gently. "Lorenzo arranged it before he died. Your mother made us swear on the Bible that you would never be brought near Elm Street. She wanted you to have a clean life, far away from syndicate blood. She didn't even know you had taken a housekeeping job at Dante's estate until three weeks ago—because you told her you were working for a hotel catering company downtown."
Guilt and shock twisted inside my chest. I had lied to my mother about working in Dante's mansion so she wouldn't panic about the DeLuca name—while for nineteen years, my frail, soft-spoken mother had been keeping a secret big enough to burn Chicago to the ground.
Dante slowly raised his head. His dark eyes looked bruised in the amber glow of the passing streetlights.
"Ma," Dante said, his voice raw and barely above a whisper. "I identified Sofia's body at Cook County Morgue myself. I buried her at Mount Carmel. Don't tell me my wife is in that house."
Carmela squeezed his hand, her thumb tracing the scarred knuckles of her eldest son. "Sofia died on the operating table at Mercy Hospital at 11:42 that night, Dante. Your father and I were standing in the corridor when the trauma surgeon came out."
"I know," Dante said, his jaw clenching against a ten-year-old agony. "I was bleeding out in the ICU down the hall from the two bullets I took in the ambush on Lower Wacker Drive an hour earlier. By the time I woke up from the coma four days later, she and the baby were already gone."
"Sofia was gone, my son," Carmela whispered, a single tear rolling down her wrinkled cheek. "Because the ambush on Lower Wacker and the truck that hit Sofia's car weren't accidents. Camilla’s father, Don Vincenzo Rossi, orchestrated both hits so he could wipe out Lorenzo’s bloodline and force a merger with our territory."
Dante’s entire body went rigid. "Lorenzo told me the Irish mob from the South Side hit my car."
"Your father lied to you when you woke up from that coma because you had a collapsed lung and two shattered ribs, and he knew you would march into Little Italy and get yourself killed!" Carmela cried softly. "And there was a second reason he lied to you, Dante. Because when the trauma surgeon came out of Sofia's operating room at 11:42... he wasn't alone."
The Maybach slowed as Enzo turned down a quiet, tree-lined cul-de-sac at the edge of Oak Park, where a modest two-story brick cottage sat behind a tall cedar privacy fence, half-hidden by weeping willow trees.
Warm yellow light glowed behind the front parlor curtains.
"Sofia was thirty-four weeks pregnant that night, Dante," Carmela whispered as the car glided to a stop beside the iron gate. "The hospital director owed your father his medical license. Lorenzo paid him half a million dollars in cash to falsify the second death certificate before Vincenzo Rossi's men in the coroner's office could check the neonatal ward."
Dante stopped breathing. His hand on the door handle turned white.
"And who did Lorenzo trust to raise her where no Rossi soldier would ever look?" Carmela asked softly, turning her gaze to me. "A dead mechanic's family in a working-class neighborhood."
Before Enzo could even open the rear door, Dante shoved it open himself and stepped out into the pouring October rain in his white shirtsleeves.
I jumped out right behind him, holding an umbrella over Carmela as Enzo lifted her onto the front porch.
Before Dante could knock, the heavy oak front door of the cottage swung inward.
Standing in the warm hallway wasn't a heavily armed bodyguard. It was my fifty-eight-year-old mother, Sarah Miller, wearing her faded floral cardigan with a white dialysis bandage taped over the shunt on her left forearm—and holding a wooden ladle dripping with chicken broth.
"Clara?" my mother gasped, nearly dropping the ladle on the braided rug. "What—how did you find this place?"
Behind my mother, tiny footsteps pattered down the carpeted stairs.
A nine-year-old girl with thick dark curls and Dante's exact fierce, almond-shaped dark eyes stopped on the bottom step. She was wearing flannel pajama pants and carrying a small, vintage red velvet girl's winter coat with mother-of-pearl buttons.
"Grandma Sarah?" the little girl asked in a clear, steady voice, holding up the red coat. "The button came off my pocket again. And who is the tall man in the wet shirt?"
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Dante stood frozen on the threshold, rainwater dripping from his dark hair onto the welcome mat, staring at the child's face—and at the silver St. Christopher medal hanging around her small neck, identical to the one inside his father's broken watch.
"That's Elena," Carmela whispered from behind him. "Your daughter, Dante."
