Chapter 5 – THE HOUSE ON OAK STREET

The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees.

Luca turned his head slowly, his eyes locking onto Vanessa.

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was pressurized, like the second before a bomb detonates.

“What did you do?” Luca asked.

His voice didn’t rise. It didn’t shake.

It was a dead, hollow sound that made the hairs on my arms stand up.

Vanessa backed against the locked library doors, clutching her gold key like a weapon.

“The child is lying!” she shrilled, her chest heaving. “She’s a traumatized brat! You’re going to believe a seven-year-old over your fiancée?”

“She’s not a brat,” Luca said softly, closing the distance between them. “She’s my daughter.”

He didn’t yell. He didn’t strike her.

He simply reached out, grabbed the lapels of Vanessa’s expensive black jacket, and lifted her completely off the floor.

Vanessa gasped, her feet kicking in the air as the gold key slipped from her fingers and clattered onto the hardwood.

“Where is Isabella?” Luca demanded, his face inches from hers.

“I—I don’t know!” Vanessa choked, clawing at his hands.

Michael stepped forward.

“Luca, put her down,” Michael warned. “If you choke her to death, we’ll never find out where she took her.”

Luca’s jaw clenched so hard I thought it might break.

He threw Vanessa aside.

She crumpled against a leather armchair, coughing violently and clutching her throat.

Luca turned to me.

“Hannah,” he ordered. “Take Lily and my mother. Go to Michael’s car in the back alley. We are going to your house.”

“But Lily said she’s not there,” I argued gently.

“We have to start where she was taken,” Michael interrupted. “If Vanessa’s men grabbed her, they might have left a trace.”

I didn’t argue anymore.

I picked Lily up in my arms. She buried her face in my neck, crying softly.

I quickly unlocked the wheels of Teresa’s chair and pushed her toward the servants’ corridor.

Ten minutes later, we were speeding through the rain-slicked streets of Chicago in Michael’s dark SUV.

Luca sat in the passenger seat, gripping the dashboard so tightly his knuckles were white.

Vanessa was bound with zip-ties in the far back, guarded by Michael, who drove with reckless speed.

We pulled onto Oak Street, the poor, rundown neighborhood where I had lived my entire life.

The flashing blue and red lights of a police cruiser were painting the wet street in neon colors.

My heart stopped.

The cruiser was parked directly in front of my small, crumbling house.

“No,” I whispered.

Michael slammed on the brakes, stopping the SUV a block away.

“Stay in the car,” Luca ordered, pulling a dark handgun from an ankle holster I never knew he had.

But I couldn’t stay.

My mother’s hospital bracelet was still burning a hole in my pocket.

I pushed the door open and ran into the rain.

“Hannah, wait!” Michael yelled.

I ignored him. I ran past the police tape, my wet shoes slipping on the cracked pavement.

A police officer grabbed my arm.

“Ma’am, you can’t go in there!”

“I live here!” I screamed, fighting against his grip. “Where is my mother?! She was in the hospital!”

The officer’s face softened slightly.

“Your mother checked herself out of the hospital two hours ago, miss,” he said. “A neighbor called us. Said they heard glass breaking.”

Luca and Michael arrived right behind me.

“Let her go,” Luca told the officer.

The officer recognized Luca Moretti immediately. He swallowed hard and stepped back.

I ran to the front door. It was shattered off its hinges.

The inside of my tiny house had been completely destroyed.

The couch was slashed. The cheap kitchen table was overturned. The medical equipment my mother relied on was smashed to pieces.

“Mom!” I screamed.

Silence.

Luca walked past me, his gun raised, moving with professional, terrifying precision.

He approached the locked door at the back of the hallway.

The basement door.

It had been crowbarred open.

We descended the wooden stairs into the darkness.

Michael found the light switch and flicked it on.

The basement apartment was a disaster. Clothes were everywhere. Isabella’s life, packed into a small, windowless room, had been violently uprooted.

But there was no blood.

No bodies.

I fell to my knees, sobbing into my hands.

My mother was gone. Isabella was gone.

Luca stood in the center of the room, staring at a small, framed drawing on the bedside table.

It was a child’s crayon drawing.

Lily’s drawing.

It showed three stick figures holding hands. A man, a woman, and a little girl.

Luca picked it up, his hand shaking.

“She drew me,” he whispered, a tear falling onto the glass. “She knew what I looked like, and she drew me.”

Michael was inspecting the broken window near the ceiling.

“They didn’t take them out the front,” Michael observed. “They dragged them through this window to the alley. It’s a professional hit squad.”

I wiped my tears, forcing myself to stand up.

I looked at the floor near the bed.

Something shiny caught the dim basement light.

I walked over and picked it up.

It was a small, silver object.

A heavy, ornate silver rosary.

But it wasn’t Vanessa’s. I knew Vanessa’s jewelry. She wore diamonds and gold.

I turned the cross over.

There was an engraving on the back.

I read the name out loud, and Michael suddenly grabbed the wall to keep from falling.

“This doesn’t belong to Vanessa,” I whispered, looking at Michael’s pale face.

“It belongs to you.”