Chapter 6 - The Ghost in the Hangar
The gun in my hand suddenly felt a thousand pounds heavy.
I stared at the man stepping into the harsh light of the hangar. He looked older, his face lined with exhaustion and a jagged scar across his jaw, but it was him. The dark hair. The posture. The eyes that were a mirror of my own.
Julian.
“You’re dead,” I breathed, the words barely making it past my lips. “I buried you.”
Julian offered a bitter, half-smile. “You buried a drifter who overdosed in my coat, Dad. I paid the medical examiner a lot of money to make the dental records match.”
Hannah lowered the revolver, her whole body shaking. “Julian? You let me believe... you let me mourn you for four years?”
Julian’s eyes softened as he looked at Hannah, and then at the sleeping child strapped to her chest. “I had to, Hannah. I had to protect you. If Celeste thought I was alive, she would never have stopped hunting me. Or Lily.”
Celeste groaned from the floor, clutching her bleeding shoulder. Victor and the other guards stood frozen, entirely unsure of who was paying them or who they should shoot.
“You set this up,” I realized, my mind racing to process the impossible. “The coat in the penthouse. The flash drive. You led me here.”
“I needed you to see the truth about her, Dad,” Julian said, walking slowly toward us. “I needed you to know she tried to kill me. She thought she succeeded. I woke up hours later, barely alive. That’s when I knew she was a Moretti. That’s when I knew she was going to systematically dismantle your life from the inside.”
“Why didn’t you come to me?” I demanded, anger suddenly fighting through the shock. “I could have protected you! I could have killed her!”
“Because you’re a mob boss!” Julian shouted back, his voice echoing loudly enough to make Victor flinch. “Your solution to everything is blood! If I told you, a war would have started. Hannah and Lily would have been caught in the crossfire. I had to let Celeste think she won, so I could dismantle her operation from the outside.”
He pulled a thick folder from his jacket and tossed it at my feet.
“That’s every offshore account, every shell company, every dirty judge she’s bought over the last four years,” Julian said. “I didn’t just fake my death. I’ve been dismantling the Moretti remnants in secret.”
I looked down at the folder, then at my son. He had become exactly what I was, just to defeat it.
Celeste laughed, a wet, coughing sound. “You think you’ve won?” she sneered from the floor. “You’re all fools.”
She reached into her coat with her good hand and pulled out a heavy, brass key.
“You can have the accounts, Julian. You can have the empire, Grant,” Celeste spat. “But you’ll never have the one thing that matters.”
She threw the key across the concrete floor. It slid and stopped perfectly at Hannah’s feet.
Hannah looked down at it, her face going completely blank.
“What is that?” I asked, stepping toward Hannah.
Hannah picked up the key. Her hands were shaking so violently she almost dropped it.
“It’s the key to a safe deposit box,” Hannah whispered, her voice hollow with terror. “At the First National Bank on 5th Avenue.”
“What’s in it?” Julian demanded, closing the distance between us.
Celeste smiled, blood staining her teeth. “The adoption papers. Forged, perfectly legal, and filed with the state supreme court. I legally adopted Lily three years ago when you were too broke to fight back, Hannah.”
The hangar went dead silent.
“If anything happens to me tonight,” Celeste continued, her voice dripping with malice, “the bank automatically forwards those papers to child protective services. They will take Lily. She will go into the system, and a convicted mob boss and a ‘dead’ man will never get her back.”
I stared at Celeste. She hadn’t just planned for my death. She had planned for my survival.
“There’s only one way to stop the transfer,” Celeste said.
May you like
She pointed to the metal briefcase in Victor’s hands.
“Give me the bonds. Give me the plane. Let me walk away. Or you lose the heir forever.”
