THE SILVER LOCKET OF BETRAYAL

The wind howled off the ocean, whipping through the charred remains of the estate.

I held the child’s drawing in my trembling hands. The bloody thumbprint over the black crown wasn’t just a mark. It was a message.

“She was here,” I whispered. “Isabella came back here five years ago. She opened this safe.”

“If she was alive five years ago,” Lucia said, her voice shaking in the cold, “why didn’t she ever come for me? Why leave me in Boston?”

I looked at the drawing. I recognized the crude crayon strokes.

This wasn’t Lucia’s drawing.

“Because she had another child,” I said.

Lucia stumbled back, her boot catching on a burnt piece of timber. “What?”

“Look at the bottom corner,” I said, pointing the flashlight beam at the paper.

Scrawled in messy, block letters was a name.

Matteo.

My heart plummeted into my stomach.

Matteo.

I had taken a boy off the streets of Boston fifteen years ago. An orphan who had been caught stealing from one of my delivery trucks. I had seen a fierce, unrelenting survival instinct in his eyes. I brought him into my home. I raised him. I trained him.

Matteo was currently the underboss of my entire syndicate.

“Answer one, open two,” I muttered.

Isabella didn’t just abandon Lucia. She had secretly raised a son in Boston. And when she could no longer protect him, she somehow orchestrated for him to be placed directly in my path.

She had hidden our son in plain sight.

“We need to leave,” I said, shoving the drawing into my coat. “Now.”

But as I turned toward the stone steps of the cellar, the sudden, brilliant glare of tactical flashlights blinded us.

“Stay exactly where you are, Santiago.”

The voice echoed down into the cellar. Calm. Educated. Familiar.

I stepped in front of Lucia, drawing my sidearm in a fluid motion.

Five men descended the stairs, their laser sights painting my chest in a sea of red dots.

And walking behind them, wearing a tailored charcoal overcoat, was Matteo.

My protégé. The boy I had raised as my own.

“Matteo,” I said, my voice dangerously even. “Tell your men to lower their weapons.”

Matteo stopped at the bottom of the stairs. He looked at me, then his gaze shifted to Lucia cowering behind my shoulder.

“I can’t do that, Boss,” Matteo said softly.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a heavy gold object. He wrapped it around his knuckles.

It was a gold rosary.

My mother’s gold rosary.

I had placed that rosary inside my older brother’s casket ten years ago when he supposedly died of a heart attack in Rome.

“Your brother sends his regards,” Matteo said.

The reversal struck me with the force of a speeding train.

My brother, Lorenzo, wasn't dead.

Lorenzo had faked his death to escape my shadow. Lorenzo was the architect of the Black Crown. And the boy I had raised to protect my empire had been working for my brother the entire time.

“You betrayed me,” I said to Matteo.

“I survived you,” Matteo corrected. He looked at Lucia. “Hand over the girl, Santiago. Lorenzo only wants his niece. He wants the bloodline. You can walk away.”

I let out a low, dark laugh.

“You lived in my house for fifteen years, Matteo,” I said, raising my gun directly at his head. “You should know I never walk away from family.”

“Fire!” Matteo commanded.

I didn’t shoot Matteo. I fired blindly into the ancient stone support column of the wine cellar.

The structural integrity of the burnt estate had been compromised for two decades.

With a deafening groan, the massive stone pillar shattered.

The ceiling of the cellar collapsed in a violent avalanche of ash, dirt, and heavy timber, burying three of the assassins instantly and throwing a massive wall of debris between us and Matteo.

“The tunnel!” I yelled, grabbing Lucia’s hand.

During my paranoid years building my empire, I had installed escape tunnels in every property I owned. I dragged Lucia to the back wall of the cellar, kicking aside a hollow wine rack.

We threw ourselves into the narrow earthen shaft just as Matteo’s remaining men began blindly firing through the dust cloud.

We scrambled through the dark, the smell of damp earth suffocating us.

“Who is Lorenzo?!” Lucia screamed as we crawled blindly forward.

“My brother,” I panted. “He’s the true head of the Black Crown.”

We burst out of the tunnel a quarter-mile away, emerging near the cliff edge where I had hidden a secondary extraction vehicle.

I threw Lucia into the passenger seat and started the engine, peeling out onto the coastal highway.

My entire empire was compromised. My underboss was a traitor. My dead brother was a cartel kingpin.

I looked at the gold rosary in my mind’s eye, the pieces finally locking into a horrifying picture.

“Isabella didn’t run away from me twenty years ago,” I realized aloud, gripping the steering wheel so hard my knuckles cracked.

Lucia looked at me, covered in dirt and trembling. “What do you mean?”

“Lorenzo didn’t kidnap her,” I said, the truth burning like acid in my veins. “She went to him. She went to Lorenzo for protection because someone in my inner circle was trying to kill her before you were born.”