Chapter 2 - The Ghost of Elena Moretti
My chest tightened into a fist of cold iron.
"A courier?" I whispered, the words tasting like ash. "With a scar across his jaw?"
Mara stared at me, searching my face for any sign of a lie, her breathing shallow and fast. "Vince," she spat out. "Your mother’s personal enforcer."
Vince.
The name hit me like a physical blow. Vince had been buried in an unmarked grave five years ago after a botched cargo hijacking in Brooklyn—a cleanup operation handled personally by my uncle before he retired. For a decade, Vince had been Elena Moretti’s shadow, executing orders that my mother claimed were strictly business, while I was kept isolated in high-end boardrooms and closed-door syndicate meetings, shielded from the dirty work.
Or so I had been told.
"Mara," I said, my voice dropping into a dangerous, chilling register that usually made rival capos wet themselves. "Look at me. Do you honestly believe I would ever—*ever*—threaten to put you in the river?"
"You were a Moretti!" she cried out, her voice cracking with the accumulated grief of two thousand nights spent raising four children in cheap motels and drafty kitchens. "You think I didn't know what world you belonged to? You told me you were just an investment banker, Dominic! But the night I found out I was pregnant, men in black suits followed me home from the clinic. They knew my blood type before I did!"
I closed the distance between us, grabbing her by the shoulders, not caring if she flinched. "When you disappeared, my mother told me you took fifty thousand dollars in cash and a plane ticket to Los Angeles because you didn't want to be tied down to a man whose hands were stained with blood. She told me you aborted the baby out of spite!"
Mara’s eyes widened, the color draining entirely from her face. "Aborted...?" She looked down at the sleeping boys on the sectional, then back up at me, her hands trembling. "She told you I got rid of them?"
"Every single day for six years," I murmured, the terrifying puzzle finally snapping into a crystal-clear, horrifying focus.
Elena Moretti hadn't just arranged my life. She had engineered my entire reality. She had cut away anything that made me human, anything that threatened her absolute control over the Moretti empire, by making us both believe the other had abandoned us.
And she had left four of my blood playing in restaurant restrooms while their mother scrubbed floors to feed them.
My phone buzzed again on the foyer table. This time, it didn't stop.
May you like
I pulled it out, swiped the screen, and pressed it to my ear.
"Dominic," my mother’s voice purred through the speaker, dripping with aristocratic ice. "The Cartwrights are leaving. You have twenty minutes to explain why you abandoned your fiancée in the middle of a five-star dining room, or I will personally strip every executive asset from your portfolio before sunrise."
