Chapter 8 - THE NORTH GATE
“Daddy!”
Sophie’s scream cut through the howling wind from the terrace lawn.
“How did she get out of the East Room?” Luca roared, already sprinting past me through the conservatory’s broken glass doors with Adrian and me right behind him.
Behind us in the study, Vito Bellini shouted before Daniel tackled him to the carpet: “I unlocked her door on my way downstairs! She’s got the keys to my town car by the service gate!”
Luca didn’t draw his gun—not with his eight-year-old daughter being dragged across the icy flagstones in the dark—and as Daniel and Marco pinned Michael and Vito to the study floor, Luca hit the snow-covered terrace at a dead run.
The floodlights along the stone perimeter wall flicked on, illuminating the wide back lawn between the greenhouse and the north service gate.
Vanessa had discarded her high heels somewhere on the stairs; she was running barefoot through the freezing slush in her torn silk engagement gown, one hand clamped tightly around Sophie’s small wrist while her other hand clutched Vito’s heavy black key fob.
Just outside the iron bars of the service gate sat Vito’s black Mercedes sedan, where his personal driver—who had been cleared out of the main driveway twenty minutes earlier with the rest of the guests—was idling at the curb with the passenger door already cracked open.
“Vanessa, let her go!” Luca shouted, his voice echoing across the courtyard as his dress shoes skidded on a patch of black ice near the fountain.
He went down hard on one knee, catching himself with his tattooed hand against the stone rim, and I surged past him along the salted gravel path that the housekeeping staff used to haul laundry carts to the gatehouse.
I knew every inch of that brick path in the dark because I walked it twice a day in cheap rubber-soled shoes.
Twenty yards ahead, Sophie wasn’t just crying—she was fighting with everything an eight-year-old had.
Remembering what her grandfather Adrian had taught her during summer afternoons before the ban, Sophie suddenly dropped her dead weight straight down onto the icy bricks, tucking her knees to her chest and grabbing the iron base of a garden lamp post with her free arm.
“No!” Sophie yelled, her voice fierce and clear in the sleet. “You’re not my mommy! Let go of me!”
Vanessa yanked viciously on the child’s arm, nearly pulling Sophie’s shoulder out of its socket. “Get up, you little brat! If your father catches me, I’m going to prison!”
“If you don’t let go of my niece right now, prison is the last thing you’ll have to worry about!” I shouted, hitting the end of the brick path at full speed.
Vanessa spun her head around just as I reached them.
She tried to shove Sophie behind her and use the little girl as a shield between herself and Luca, who was now ten paces back and closing the distance like a hunting wolf.
“Stay back, Luca!” Vanessa screamed, pulling a heavy iron garden trowel from the stone planter beside the service gate and holding the pointed blade near Sophie’s throat. “Open the pedestrian gate with the master switch, or I swear to God I’ll hurt her!”
Luca froze six feet away, both hands raised at shoulder height, the sleet plastering his dark hair to his forehead as his eyes stayed locked on his daughter’s terrified face.
“Look at me, Vanessa,” Luca said, his voice dropping into that quiet, steady cadence he used when everything was on the line. “Let Sophie walk over to Hannah, and I will press the release button on the wall myself. You walk out that gate, you get in your father’s car, and you head to O’Hare. You have my word you walk through that gate tonight.”
“You think I’m stupid?” Vanessa’s chest heaved, her bare feet blue against the freezing stone, tears and rain streaking the makeup down her cheeks. “My father helped your brother cut Elena’s brakes! I doped your kid and tried to sell her to her grandfather for fifty grand to pay off the mechanic! The second I let go of her, you’ll bury me!”
“Look at Sophie’s hand, Vanessa,” I said quietly, stepping two inches closer on her blind side near the stone planter. “You’re holding her left wrist—the one where your diamond bracelet is catching on her wool sleeve. She can’t even move her fingers.”
Vanessa glanced down for a fraction of a second at her diamond tennis bracelet—the one she had clutched in the dining room when Teresa exposed her blackmail payments—which had tangled in the knit cuff of Sophie’s navy coat.
That single downward glance was all I needed.
I didn’t have weapons training, and I didn’t know how Luca’s men fought, but I had spent the last year lifting a seventy-two-year-old stroke patient in and out of beds and bathtubs by myself.
I lunged forward, grabbed Vanessa’s right wrist with both hands above the iron trowel, and twisted her arm straight upward against the joint while driving my shoulder into her ribs.
The trowel clattered harmlessly across the icy bricks.
The fragile gold clasp of her diamond bracelet snapped clean in two against Sophie’s coat cuff, sending tiny white links scattering into the slush as I wrenched Sophie backward into my chest and threw my arms around her head.
Luca was on Vanessa before she even hit the ground.
He didn’t strike her; he pinned her face-down against the wet flagstones with one knee between her shoulder blades while Daniel and two state troopers—whose cruisers had just pulled up behind Vito’s idling town car with red and blue lights flashing silently through the sleet—came through the service gate that Adrian had just opened from the guard box.
“Wait,” I breathed, hugging Sophie tightly against my apron as I watched Adrian Costa standing calmly inside the brick gatehouse with the land-line receiver in his hand. “You called the police?”
Adrian stepped out of the gatehouse into the red and blue lights, looking straight at Luca.
“I called my brother-in-law in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office the second Daniel went upstairs for Vanessa,” Adrian said firmly. “With Sonny Varga’s garage photos, the cut brake line invoice, and the bank transfers from Vito and Michael, they’re going away for conspiracy and murder under the law, Luca. No blood on your hands tonight—not in front of Elena’s little girl, and not in front of your sister.”
Luca stood up slowly as the troopers clicked handcuffs around Vanessa’s wrists and led Vito and Michael out the front doors in irons.
For a long moment, the feared head of the Moretti family looked at the police cars taking his brother away—and then he looked down at me, kneeling on the icy bricks with his daughter safe in my arms and my palm bleeding where the diamond clasp had cut my skin.
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He didn’t tell his men to intervene.
Instead, Luca reached down with both hands and pulled me—and Sophie—up from the cold together.
