Chapter 3 - THE HOSPITAL BRACELET
At the far end of the banquet table, twenty-eight-year-old Catherine didn't cry out. She didn't try to run. She simply folded her trembling hands in her lap, staring down at her untouched plate of prime rib as tears spilled silently onto the fine bone china.
Marcus froze mid-stride. He looked from the pink plastic hospital bracelet in Richard’s fingers to his younger sister.
"What did Dad just say?" Marcus’s voice was barely a croak. "Catherine... Melissa died in that hospital ten years ago giving birth to Daniel. I held her hand in the recovery room before her heart stopped. What is your name doing on my son's bracelet?"
Daniel pulled away from Eleanor’s embrace, his ten-year-old face scrunched in distress as he looked at the woman he had called Auntie his entire life. "Aunt Catherine? Why is Grandpa saying that?"
Catherine finally lifted her head. Her dark eyes, so much like Richard’s, were hollow with a decade of suffocating grief.
"Because Melissa’s baby didn't survive that night, Marcus," Catherine whispered, her voice cracking in the dead silence of the locked dining room. "Your son was stillborn."
Marcus staggered backward as if he had been struck in the chest with a sledgehammer. He caught the edge of a serving cart, sending silver platters crashing to the marble floor. "No. No, you’re lying! The doctor brought Daniel to me an hour later! He was crying, he was healthy—"
"That wasn't Melissa’s baby," Patricia interrupted from the locked door, her voice sharp and urgent. "It was Catherine’s."
Richard stared at his wife, then at his daughter. "Catherine was eighteen years old ten years ago. You told me you sent her to that boarding academy in Switzerland for the spring semester!"
"She wasn't in Switzerland, Richard," Patricia said, gripping the brass key tighter as she glanced again at the grandfather clock. It was now 9:35 PM. "She was seven months pregnant. And she went into labor at a private clinic on the exact same night Melissa was admitted to St. Elizabeth’s with severe preeclampsia."
Richard’s hand shook as he clutched the tiny pink bracelet. "Who was the father, Catherine?"
Catherine flinched, shrinking back into her chair. "I can't tell you, Dad. Please don't make me say it."
"Tell me!" Richard thundered, the veins in his neck bulging. "Why would my own daughter have to hide her pregnancy and give away her child in my house?"
"Because the father was Lucas Moretti!" Patricia shouted over him.
A collective gasp echoed from the relatives still huddled around the room. Even Julian’s gun wavered slightly in his hand.
Ten years ago, the Castellano and Moretti families had been locked in a brutal, bloody turf war over the Boston shipping piers. Lucas Moretti had been the nineteen-year-old heir to the rival syndicate—and two weeks before Daniel was born, Lucas had been gunned down in an ambush ordered by Marcus himself.
Marcus’s knees buckled. He sank into a chair, staring at ten-year-old Daniel in horror. "My son... the boy I’ve raised for ten years... is Lucas Moretti’s blood?"
"He’s my son!" Catherine sobbed, finally breaking down as she stood up and reached toward the terrified boy. "Lucas and I loved each other! We were going to run away from Boston so our families couldn't tear us apart, and then Marcus killed him! When I went into early labor, Patricia told me that if you or Marcus found out I was carrying a Moretti baby, you would have him killed—just like your father tried to do to Julian!"
"I would never hurt a child!" Richard roared, his voice cracking with agony. "I am not my father!"
"How could we be sure?" Eleanor spoke up from the center of the room, her eighty-six-year-old voice ringing with quiet authority. Everyone turned to the matriarch. "Look at what this life has done to every single one of you, Richard. When Melissa lost her baby that night, Marcus was suicidal with grief. He was ready to take a machine gun to every Moretti in New England. So Patricia and Frank paid the hospital administrator fifty thousand dollars to switch the records. Catherine got to watch her son grow up safe under this roof, and Marcus got a reason to stay alive."
Daniel was crying now, backing away from Marcus, from Catherine, from everyone until his small back hit the serving table where Hannah stood.
"I want to go to my room," Daniel whimpered, wiping his nose on his sleeve. "Grandma, make them stop talking."
Hannah knelt immediately in her housekeeper’s apron and wrapped her arms around the boy, shielding his face against her shoulder just as she had done a hundred times over the last five years whenever he scraped a knee in the garden.
Then Hannah looked up at Patricia, her eyes narrowing.
"Wait a minute," Hannah said, her voice cutting through the emotional chaos. "If this secret kept the peace for ten years, why did my mother—Caroline—call me this morning and tell me I had to get Daniel out of this house before midnight?"
Patricia’s face went ghostly pale. She turned and pressed her ear briefly against the heavy oak door, listening to the silence in the front foyer beyond.
"Because the doctor who signed those falsified birth records died in hospice three days ago," Patricia whispered, her defiance finally crumbling into sheer terror. "And his greedy nephew found the original copies in his safe. He didn't bring them to me, Richard. Yesterday morning, he sold them to old Don Salvatore Moretti for half a million dollars."
The air left the room.
Don Salvatore Moretti had lost his only grandson, Lucas, ten years ago. He believed his bloodline was extinct.
"Moretti knows," Richard breathed, his eyes widening. "He knows Daniel is his great-grandson."
"Yes!" Patricia sobbed, holding up the brass key. "Why do you think I locked this door?! Why do you think I tried to throw Eleanor’s lunchbox in the trash before anyone could see what was inside?! At nine o'clock tonight, Salvatore’s men cut the phone lines and paid off the outer gate guards! They aren't coming here to start a war, Richard—they’re coming at midnight to take Daniel!"
Julian lowered his pistol, his face paling as he turned toward the tall French windows overlooking the dark estate driveway. "Wait. If the outer guards were paid off at nine... why haven't our house alarms gone off?"
Frank slowly raised his trembling hand from his armchair. He pulled a heavy gold pocket watch from his vest and clicked it open.
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"Because the alarm codes were changed an hour ago," Frank said, his voice hollow. "And they aren't waiting until midnight."
Before Richard could lunge for his brother, the heavy stained-glass transom window above the locked dining room door shattered inward in a shower of colored glass, and a smoking black canister rolled across the white linen tablecloth.
