Chapter 5 - THE HOUSE ON IRVING PARK
“How did Bellini find Irving Park?” Luca barked, already sprinting toward the foyer.
Uncle Sal cursed under his breath, limping as fast as he could behind us while Marco grabbed two heavy wool coats from the hall closet.
I looked back at Vanessa, who was standing frozen in the doorway of the dining room.
Her diamond bracelet—the heavy platinum one her father had given her for her birthday last week—was glinting under the hall sconces. Except one of the square emerald-cut links on the underside wasn't platinum at all; it had a microscopic green LED blinking beneath the clasp.
“Mr. Moretti!” I called out, grabbing Vanessa’s wrist and holding it up as Luca spun around by the front door. “Her father didn’t follow Uncle Sal. He put a GPS audio bug inside her birthday bracelet. He heard everything you just said in the dining room—and someone else tipped him off before that!”
Luca didn’t waste a second. With one wrench of his hand, he snapped the platinum clasp off Vanessa’s wrist, threw the bracelet onto the marble floor, and crushed the blinking transmitter beneath the heel of his boot.
“Lock her and Aunt Teresa in the study with two guards,” Luca ordered his second-in-command. “Sal, Marco—in the SUV.”
“Wait, take me with you!” I said before I could stop myself.
Luca paused with his hand on the heavy front door, looking back at my black housekeeping uniform.
“Emma, there are armed men heading to that house,” he said fiercely. “This isn’t your fight.”
“I’m the one who stocked the pantry and cleaned that house four months ago,” I said, clutching the walnut sewing box and the silver rosary against my chest. “There’s an old coal-chute storm cellar behind the pantry shelves that isn't on the city blueprints. If Nurse Martha hid him down there, your men won’t find the latch—and if an eleven-year-old boy who’s never seen you before hears men kicking down the door, he’s going to run from you unless someone has his grandmother’s rosary.”
Luca stared at me for half a heartbeat.
“Get in the car,” he said.
Twenty-two minutes had never felt longer in my life.
Marco drove the armored black Escalade up Lake Shore Drive and cut west toward Irving Park at eighty miles an hour, running every late-night yellow light along the avenue. Sitting beside me in the back seat, Luca never took his eyes off the windshield, his thumb turning the black key marked 317 over and over in his palm.
“He thinks I died before he was born,” Luca said quietly, almost to himself. “What if he looks at me and only sees another man trying to lock him in a room?”
“Then don’t act like a boss when you walk in there, Mr. Moretti,” I said softly, holding up the child’s drawing of the snowman and the green porch. “Act like his father.”
Luca looked at me, the hard lines around his eyes softening with something that made my chest ache.
Marco killed the headlights half a block from the quiet tree-lined street.
Two dark sedans were parked crookedly at the curb outside the narrow brick house with the green porch roof. The front gate hung open, and the porch light had been smashed.
Luca didn’t wait for backup. He and Marco moved up the icy front steps like shadows, while Uncle Sal and I stayed two paces behind near the side hydrangea bushes.
Through the shattered glass of the front door, we heard heavy footsteps thudding across the upstairs floorboards and a raspy voice shouting down the stairs:
“Nothing up here! Check the basement stairs again—the old lady’s tea on the stove is still warm!”
From the kitchen came the sound of wooden cabinets being wrenched open and dishes crashing to the linoleum.
Luca signaled Marco toward the front hall, then slipped around the side alley with me and Sal following closely to the back service porch.
The back door had been jimmy-rigged with a crowbar. Inside the dark kitchen, a bulky man in a leather coat stood beside the overturned kitchen table, holding a flashlight toward the basement door.
Luca crossed the linoleum without making a sound. Before the man could turn, Luca drove his forearm into the back of the man’s neck, catching the flashlight before it hit the floor and locking the man’s wrists in zip-ties within five seconds.
In the front hallway, a sharp scuffle echoed—two heavy thuds, a groan, and then Marco’s low whistle signaling the ground floor was clear.
I ran straight into the butler’s pantry behind the kitchen.
Cans of soup and flour canisters had been swept onto the floor by Bellini’s men, who had missed the recessed wooden panel behind the lower spice rack. I dropped to my knees, reached behind the baseboard, and pulled the iron release ring.
A three-foot section of shelving swung inward.
Sitting huddled in the cramped brick alcove beneath the stairs was a gray-haired woman in a cardigan, her arms wrapped tightly around a skinny eleven-year-old boy in a faded blue hoodie.
The boy had a split lip, wide dark eyes, and a tiny crescent birthmark just below his left ear.
He raised a heavy brass fireplace poker with both shaking hands.
“Stay back!” the boy whispered fiercely, stepping in front of the older woman. “I’ll hit you!”
Luca knelt slowly in the doorway behind me, keeping his hands completely open at his sides.
“Leo,” Luca said, his voice breaking on the name.
May you like
The boy stared at Luca’s face—then at the identical birthmark beneath Luca’s left ear—and lowered the poker half an inch.
“Nana Lucia said my dad died,” Leo whispered, his small voice trembling. “Why do you look like the picture in her locket?”
