Chapter 3 - THE CHILD'S DRAWING
The silence in the medical room felt heavier than the air before a thunderstorm. Luca held his mother’s silver rosary in his palm. His knuckles turned stark white as his grip tightened around the beads. Twenty years. For two decades, the Moretti family had hunted the men responsible for the ambush that took his mother’s life. They had torn apart rival syndicates, burned warehouses to the ground, and interrogated dozens of men in dark, soundproof basements. They had never found the killer. They had never found the rosary. And now, it had been sitting in his fiancée’s jewelry box, right under his own roof. “She knew,” Luca whispered. The realization hit him like a physical blow. Vanessa Bellini wasn’t just a wealthy socialite his capos had recommended to legitimize his empire. She was connected to the oldest, deepest wound in his life. “Did she tell you why she had it?” Luca asked, his voice dead and flat. “No,” I replied, shivering despite the warmth of the room. “When she caught me holding it in her bedroom, she went completely crazy. She dragged me into the hallway and shoved me into the linen closet.” I looked down at my fractured fingers. “She demanded I give it back. When I refused, she slammed the door on my hand. Over and over.” Luca’s eyes darkened. The image of his fiancée torturing a helpless maid in his own hallway disgusted him. But the fact that she had done it to protect the trophy of his mother’s murder ignited something terrifying inside him. “Why didn’t you give it to her, Claire?” he asked softly. “You could have saved yourself.” I swallowed hard. “Because I recognized the crest on the back of the cross. I saw the same crest on the portrait of your mother in the grand foyer.” I looked him directly in the eye. “My father was a union worker, Mr. Moretti. He was killed on a construction site when I was ten. The company covered it up. They hid the evidence. I know what it feels like to have the truth stolen from you. I wasn’t going to let her steal yours.” Luca stared at me. The invisible wall that separated the billionaire boss from the twenty-eight-year-old housemaid cracked. He saw me. Truly saw me. Not as a uniform, but as a woman who had endured physical agony simply because it was the right thing to do. He reached out, his hand hovering over my injured fingers for a fraction of a second, before he gently tapped the edge of the examination table. “You have my gratitude, Claire,” he said. “And my protection. From this moment forward, no one in this city will ever touch you again.” It wasn't an empty promise. It was a blood vow. “But Vanessa was looking for something else, too,” I said, pulling my thoughts back to the nightmare upstairs. Luca frowned. “Something else?” “Yes. When she was screaming at me through the closet door, she kept asking where I put the paper.” “What paper?” I reached into my other pocket. My uniform had become a treasure chest of dangerous secrets. I pulled out a folded piece of heavy, cream-colored stationery. It was crumpled and slightly torn at the edges. “I found this underneath the rosary,” I explained, handing it to him. Luca unfolded the paper. It wasn’t a legal document. It wasn’t a blackmail letter. It was a drawing. Done in bright, messy crayons. It showed a stick figure of a man holding hands with a much smaller stick figure of a little boy. Above them, a yellow sun with uneven rays smiled down. But it was the words written in clumsy, block letters at the bottom that made my chest ache. HELP ME DADDY. Luca stared at the drawing. The brutal mafia boss looked utterly bewildered by the innocent, heartbreaking image. “Whose child drew this?” he asked. I pointed to the top corner of the paper. There, written in the same clumsy, five-year-old handwriting, was a name. LEO. And right beneath it, a second word. JULIAN. Luca stopped breathing. He looked at the name. Then at the drawing. Then back at the name. “Julian,” Luca repeated, the pieces finally clicking together in his strategic mind. “My best man. He has a son?” “Vanessa has been hiding him,” I said quietly. I had answered his question about the drawing. But I had opened two terrifying new ones. How did Vanessa get her hands on Julian’s secret child? And what was she forcing a desperate father to do in exchange for his son’s life? Luca’s face turned to stone. “Vanessa didn’t give Julian the deed to the docks to help him,” Luca realized, his voice vibrating with lethal anger. “She forced him to steal it for her. And the message you photographed—Do it before he says I do—” Luca looked at the door leading out to the hallway. “She wants Julian to assassinate me before the wedding.” The betrayal was absolute. His fiancée was orchestrating his murder. His best friend was the loaded gun. And an innocent child was the hostage keeping the finger on the trigger. Suddenly, a sharp, frantic knock echoed on the oak door. “Boss!” a voice called out from the hallway. It was Marco, the head of Luca’s security detail. Luca opened the door. “What is it?” Marco looked panicked. “Julian just left the dining room. He said he felt sick. But he didn’t go to the bathroom.” “Where did he go?” Marco swallowed hard. “He went into your private quarters, Boss. And he pulled a silenced pistol from his jacket before he walked in.” Luca didn’t flinch. He reached behind his back, smoothly drawing a heavy, black handgun from his waistband. “Stay here,” he ordered me. Then, he walked out into the hallway to face his best friend.
