Chapter 7 - THE WINTER RECKONING
The air in room 4B seemed to turn to solid ice.
For five years, Dante Moretti had lived with the tormenting guilt that his mother had died in a tragic highway accident while rushing back to Manhattan after an argument with him over the family business.
Slowly, Dante turned his head toward Lydia Gable. The muscle in his jaw ticked once. The raw, volcanic fury radiating from him was so intense that even his own seasoned bodyguards took a half-step back.
"You killed my mother," Dante whispered.
"I didn't mean for Lucia to drink it!" Lydia cried out, her composed, iron-fisted demeanor crumbling completely as she sagged between the two guards holding her arms. "The poison was meant to slow Giovanni’s heart so the auditors wouldn't come on Monday! My sister Clara was dying of lupus—her husband left us with nothing when the family cut off our branch thirty years ago! You lived in twenty-thousand-square-foot palaces importing marble from Italy while my sister rotted in a state ward! I took what our family owed us!"
"By murdering the woman who gave you a job and a roof over your head?" Dante’s voice rose to a roar that shook the glass panes of the window. "By leaving an old man to freeze in the dark in his own waste for five years? By buying off a coward to send a pregnant twenty-three-year-old woman here so you could murder her for her dead father’s trust fund?"
Nora swayed slightly, her hand pressing against the tightening muscles of her stomach. Looking at Lydia Gable, she saw no monster from a fairy tale—only the terrifying rot of greed and resentment that had festered for decades until human lives meant nothing beside a bank balance.
"Take her and these two guards down to the armored transport in the garage," Dante ordered his men, his voice dropping back into lethal control. "Lock them in the holding vault until the state prosecutor and federal marshals can reach the mountain after the storm. And make sure every single asset in her name is frozen within the hour—except the direct wire to the Albany clinic."
Lydia’s head snapped up in shock. "What?"
"Your sister didn't poison my mother or torture my father," Dante said coldly. "Her medical bills will be paid by the Moretti foundation directly so you can never use a sick woman as an excuse for your sins again. You, however, will never see daylight outside a maximum-security federal prison cell for the rest of your life. Get her out of my sight."
As the guards dragged Lydia Gable weeping down the corridor, the sudden silence in room 4B felt overwhelming.
Nora let out a breath she felt like she had been holding for hours—and then gasped sharply as a hot gush of fluid soaked through the hem of her maid’s uniform and pooled onto the stone floor.
A vise-like contraction seized her abdomen, so powerful that the velvet box slipped from her fingers.
"Nora!" Dante caught her before she could fall, scooping her up against his chest as she cried out, curling her bandaged hands into his shirt.
"The baby," Nora panted, panic seizing her throat as another wave of pain tore through her back. "Dante, it’s too early! I’m only six and a half months! The roads are buried under three feet of snow—we can't get to a hospital!"
In the wheelchair, Giovanni gripped both armrests, his eyes wide with terror for the girl who had kept him alive through the longest winter of his life.
"Marco! Get Dr. Russo and the medical trunks to the master bedroom on this floor immediately!" Dante barked, carrying Nora swiftly down the corridor toward his own massive suite, where the backup generators kept the heating and lighting at full capacity. "And tell the kitchen to boil every pot of water they have!"
Dante kicked open the double doors of the master suite and laid Nora carefully onto the massive king-sized bed.
"Look at me, Nora," Dante said fiercely, dropping to his knees beside the bed and taking her bandaged hand between both of his large, warm palms. "You listen to me. My mother built an emergency medical suite in the west wing for my father five years ago. We have an incubator, oxygen, and one of the best doctors in New York under this roof right now. Neither you nor Lily is going anywhere."
Nora stared at him through a blur of tears and pain, stunned. "How... how do you know her name is Lily?"
Dante reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small digital audio recorder connected to the chandelier receiver. "Because for the last three weeks, every night when I couldn't sleep in Manhattan, I listened to the audio logs from my father’s room," he admitted softly, his thumb brushing a tear from her cheek. "I didn't know which maid it was because you always sat on the floor out of frame by the fire. I only knew your voice. I knew you fed him warm soup. I knew you sang him to sleep when the wind howled. And I knew you promised your daughter she would never know the cold."
Dr. Russo burst into the room carrying two stainless-steel medical cases, followed by Marco pushing a portable neonatal incubator on wheels from the medical wing.
May you like
"Her water broke, Doc," Dante said, refusing to let go of Nora’s hand even as Nora squeezed his fingers hard enough to bruise. "Tell me she’s going to be okay."
Dr. Russo pulled on sterile gloves, examined Nora quickly under the bright bedside lamps, and looked up with grave urgency. "The stress and physical trauma have triggered active preterm labor, and the baby is breech. If I can't turn this baby in the next ten minutes, Nora is going to hemorrhage before a helicopter can ever fly through this blizzard."
