Chapter 7 - DRY DOCK FOUR
"She’s been living with the Morettis for thirty-two years?" Julian stared at the faded farmhouse photograph in Richard’s hand, his voice shaking as the cold October wind whipped off the water. "My mother... the woman we thought was a helpless victim hiding in Vermont... has been under Salvatore Moretti’s protection this whole time?"
"Think about what we did to her!" Hannah cried, tears stinging her cheeks as she looked from Richard to Eleanor. "Grandpa Vincenzo burned her house down, stole her newborn baby, let Patricia raise her three-year-old son, and framed her for killing four federal agents so she could never come back! Where else could a twenty-two-year-old woman go except to the only family in Boston that hated the Castellanos as much as she did?!"
On the cabin cruiser deck, Marcus slumped against the fiberglass cabin wall, his face pale with sweat as Catherine pressed a clean towel from the boat’s galley against his bleeding ribs.
"Wait," Marcus wheezed, his dark eyes locking onto his father. "If Caroline has been with Salvatore Moretti for thirty-two years... then she was there ten years ago when my men ambushed Lucas Moretti!"
Catherine gasped, her hands flying to her mouth as she looked down at ten-year-old Daniel. "Lucas told me before he died that he had an aunt in New Hampshire who helped him hide our relationship from his grandfather. He called her Aunt Carrie! Oh God... Caroline knew ten years ago that I was carrying Lucas’s baby!"
Every piece of the thirty-two-year puzzle slammed together with terrifying clarity.
"Caroline didn't find out about Daniel three days ago from a blackmailer," Richard said, his voice hollow as he looked at the pink hospital bracelet still clutched in his fist. "She’s known since the night Daniel was born that he was Lucas Moretti’s son—and that Patricia and Frank switched the hospital records to give him to Marcus."
"Then why did she wait ten years to make a move?" Julian demanded, gripping his nine-millimeter pistol. "Why attack the house tonight?"
"Because of me," Hannah whispered, looking down at her housekeeper’s apron. "Five years ago, Grandma Eleanor hired me to work at the mansion. And last week, Grandma finally told me I was Richard’s daughter. When Caroline called me on the house line this morning... she didn't know Grandma had already told me the truth. She called because Frank warned her that Grandma was going to open that lunchbox at Daniel’s tenth birthday dinner tonight!"
Richard turned slowly to look at his eighty-six-year-old mother.
"If that lunchbox opened tonight," Richard said, his voice trembling, "the truth about Catherine and Daniel would come out in front of thirty people—including Salvatore Moretti’s informants. And once old Don Salvatore found out that his dead grandson’s child had been raised under my roof for ten years by the very man who killed Lucas, Salvatore would burn Boston to the ground to take Daniel away from Catherine and Marcus!"
"Caroline wasn't attacking the house to help Salvatore kill Daniel," Hannah realized, her breath catching. "And those men who threw the tear gas into the dining room tonight... they didn't shoot a single person until Marcus and Julian fired through the door! Frank and Caroline staged that raid tonight to create a distraction so I could get Daniel out of the house before Salvatore Moretti found out who he really was!"
"Then why did Frank give you the key to Dry Dock Four?" Patricia asked from the gravel path, her voice shaking.
"Because Salvatore found out tonight anyway," Eleanor said grimly, pointing downriver toward the glowing amber floodlights of the industrial harbor two miles away. "Look at the sky over the piers."
Thick black smoke was beginning to curl upward behind the towering rusted cranes of Dry Dock Four.
"Frank didn't betray us to Salvatore," Julian breathed, the blood draining from his face as he remembered the three gunshots behind the secret pantry door. "Those men in the dining room were Salvatore’s hitmen! Frank stayed behind in that pantry to stop them from following us into the tunnel—and Caroline is waiting at Dry Dock Four right now, thinking we’re bringing Daniel to safety, when Salvatore’s men are already on their way there to trap her!"
"Nobody is touching her," Richard roared, thirty-two years of grief and love igniting in his chest. He turned to Marcus and Catherine on the boat. "Marcus, take the boat out into the harbor channel and anchor near the Coast Guard cutter. Do not bring Daniel near the piers!"
"Grandpa, no!" Daniel yelled from the boat deck, grabbing the rail with both small hands. "You can't go there if the bad men have guns! Please stay with us!"
Richard stepped onto the wooden dock and gripped his ten-year-old grandson’s hands through the railing. For a moment, the feared Don of Boston looked only like a grandfather who had finally learned what mattered.
"Daniel, listen to me," Richard said softly. "For thirty-two years, this family hid behind lies because we were too proud and too scared to tell the truth. That ends tonight. You stay here and take care of your mother, your dad, and your great-grandmother. I’m going to bring Hannah and Julian’s mother home."
"I'm coming with you, Richard," Patricia said suddenly from behind him.
Richard turned, glaring at his wife. "After everything you did?"
"I raised Julian for twenty-nine years, and I kept Catherine’s secret for ten," Patricia said fiercely, wiping her tear-streaked face as she pulled the keys to Hannah’s Honda Civic from Hannah’s trembling hand. "Caroline trusted me with her son when we were twenty years old. I owe her my life. Get in the car."
Ten minutes later, the battered Honda Civic smashed through the rusted chain-link perimeter gate of Dry Dock Four, tires screeching across the wet concrete apron.
The cavernous, abandoned shipyard was eerily quiet save for the lapping of black harbor water against the concrete floodgates and a burning trash barrel sending black smoke into the sky. Parked near the edge of the dry dock pit were three black Cadillacs.
Standing beneath a single sodium floodlight beside the rusted sluice gate was a woman in a navy wool coat, her silver-streaked dark hair blowing in the harbor wind. Her hands were bound behind her back with zip-ties, and kneeling bleeding beside her on the wet concrete—alive, though clutching a gunshot wound to his shoulder—was seventy-four-year-old Frank.
Standing behind them with a heavy chrome revolver pressed against Caroline’s temple was eighty-two-year-old Don Salvatore Moretti, flanked by six armed enforcers.
Richard, Julian, Hannah, and Patricia stepped out of the Civic with their hands visible, stopping thirty feet away under the glare of the headlights.
Caroline lifted her head. Across thirty-two years of stolen time, her dark eyes locked first onto Hannah—tracing the tiny crescent birthmark beneath her daughter’s ear—then onto Julian’s tall frame, and finally onto Richard.
"Richard," Caroline’s voice echoed across the concrete, steady and unbroken despite the gun at her head. "Why did you come? I told Hannah to take the boy and run!"
"Where is my great-grandson, Castellano?!" Don Salvatore shouted, his voice raspy with eighty years of venom as he cocked the hammer of the chrome revolver against Caroline’s skull. "Frank here thought he could sneak Caroline onto a boat tonight before I found out she’s been hiding Lucas’s son in your house for ten years! Bring the boy to me right now, or I paint this dock with your first wife’s blood!"
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Richard didn't draw his weapon. Instead, he took three slow steps forward into the floodlight, reaching inside his coat pocket.
"You won't pull that trigger, Salvatore," Richard said calmly, pulling out the faded 1994 chemical receipt and the hospital discharge record from Eleanor’s lunchbox. "Because Caroline hasn't been hiding in your farmhouse for thirty-two years as your guest. Tell your six men standing behind you whose signature is on the 1994 FBI informant file that put your oldest son—Lucas's father—in federal prison for twenty years."
