Chapter 8 - THE HOUSE WITH THE GREEN DOOR
Marco had never been attacked in the alley.
While Luca and I were behind the linen rack in the laundry room, Marco had heard enough—or he had already Forced the Evanston address out of Mrs. Gable when his men grabbed her ten minutes ago. He had staged the kidnapping with Vanessa to get out of the mansion without Luca stopping him, and now he was heading straight for Clara and the children.
"Come with me," Luca said.
"Me?" I asked as he grabbed my hand, pulling me at a dead run down the basement corridor toward the subterranean garage.
"Clara doesn't remember me knowing the truth, and those children have never seen my face outside of a photograph," Luca said fiercely, punching the code into the steel door of his private garage. "She knows you, Sophie. You were the girl who held her wedding train in the rain and kept her secret tonight. If we walk into that house, you're the only face she won't run from."
He opened the passenger door of a matte-black Mercedes sedan and helped me in before vaulting across the hood and sliding behind the wheel.
The engine roared to life like a caged beast. Luca didn't call the police, and he didn't wait for the guards who were still blocking the expressway ramps downtown. He hit the remote for the heavy iron gate, and the tires screamed against the pavement as we shot out onto Lake Shore Drive heading north toward Evanston.
I gripped the leather armrest with one hand and held onto my apron with the other as the speedometer climbed past ninety.
As he drove, Luca picked up the encrypted phone from the console and barked a single order to his head of security: "Santoro turned on us. He’s heading to 412 Maple Lane in Evanston with a crew and two hostages. Bring everyone there now—no sirens, come in from the lake side."
He tossed the phone down, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. In the flashing orange glow of the streetlights, I saw the torment carved into every line of his face.
"For six years," Luca said, his voice low and raw over the roar of the engine, "Marco sat across from me at Sunday dinner. He watched me wake up from that coma with my skull wired together, asking why I felt like half my soul was missing. And he looked me in the eye and told me there was no one else in that car."
"Why did he do it?" I asked quietly.
"Because my father was dying of lung cancer six years ago," Luca said, swerving smoothly around a delivery truck as we crossed the Evanston border. "Under the old family charter, if I died without a wife or a legitimate heir, control of the shipping ports and forty million dollars in trust funds passed directly to Marco. That ambush on Sheridan Road six years ago wasn't a rival family, Sophie. It was Marco."
My breath caught. "He tried to kill both of you."
"And when I survived with no memory of Clara," Luca said, his jaw tightening, "Marco made a deal with Victor Bellini to bury the truth. Clara probably agreed to pretend I didn't exist—and later agreed to marry Marco in Wisconsin—because Marco threatened to finish what he started on Sheridan Road if she ever told me about Danny."
We turned sharply onto a quiet, tree-lined suburban street covered in patchy autumn leaves. Luca killed the headlights half a block before number 412, letting the heavy sedan coast silently to the curb behind a row of parked cars.
There it was.
A small two-story yellow clapboard house with a dark green front door and a white porch railing—the exact house from Danny’s crayon drawing.
Parked in the gravel driveway with its engine still ticking was a black SUV.
"Stay in the car and lock the doors," Luca whispered, checking the magazine of his nine-millimeter pistol. "When I clear the downstairs, I'll signal from the porch."
"Mr. Moretti," I whispered, grabbing his wrist. "Wait. Look at the upstairs window on the left."
Behind the sheer curtains of the second-floor bedroom, a small silhouette in a yellow hood was peeking down at the driveway, holding something bundle-wrapped in its arms.
Danny was upstairs with the baby.
And down on the back lawn, near the garage side door, two men in dark jackets were standing guard while Marco’s voice echoed faintly from inside the kitchen.
"The keycard Mrs. Gable left in the raincoat," I whispered quickly, holding up the silver card. "It has a security company logo on it—North Shore Safe Room. Look at the small cellar bulkhead behind those lilac bushes on the right side of the porch. Mrs. Gable wouldn't have sent a keycard if it was just a normal wooden door!"
Luca’s eyes gleamed in the dark. "A reinforced basement shelter. That's where Martha told Clara to take the kids if anyone ever came."
"If you take care of the two guards by the kitchen," I said, my heart hammering in my ears, "I can slip behind the lilac bushes, unlock the cellar shelter from the outside, and get Clara and the boys in there before Marco breaks down the upstairs door."
Luca stared at me for two seconds—a twenty-five-year-old housemaid in a stained apron who had started the evening mending a hem for minimum wage.
"You're the bravest woman I've ever met, Sophie Miller," Luca said softly. "Stay behind the bushes until you hear me drop the two in the back."
We slipped out of the car into the crisp October night. Luca vanished into the shadows along the left side of the house like a phantom.
I crouched low, creeping behind the thick row of overgrown lilac bushes along the right foundation wall. Seconds later, I heard two muffled impacts from the back patio—no gunshots, just the brutal, efficient sound of Luca taking down both guards before they could even yell.
Inside the house, glass shattered, and Marco’s voice roared from the second-floor landing: "Open this door, Clara! I have your sister and Martha downstairs! Open it before I shoot through the lock!"
I reached the steel bulkhead doors behind the bushes. Right beside them, leading straight down from the second-floor porch roof, was an old iron fire-escape ladder—and standing at the bottom of it, trembling in the dark with a five-year-old boy clinging to her leg and a baby strapped to her chest, was Clara.
She had climbed out the bedroom window while Marco was screaming at the locked bedroom door inside!
When she saw me step out from the bushes, she raised a heavy iron fireplace poker to strike—until the porch light hit my face.
Her eyes went wide. "You..." she breathed. "The girl from the hotel in Wisconsin."
"Mrs. Gable sent me," I whispered urgently, swiping the silver keycard across the electronic keypad hidden inside the bulkhead frame. The heavy steel shelter door clicked unlocked. "Get the boys inside right now!"
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"Not so fast," a voice snarled behind us.
Vanessa stepped around the corner of the front porch, her torn ivory wedding gown hiked up in one hand—and a snub-nosed revolver pointed straight at her twin sister’s chest in the other.
