Chapter 4 – THE MOLE AND THE CHILD’S DRAWING

The betrayal was suffocating.

Marcus, the man who had guarded the Bellucci family for ten years, was standing on the screen with a gun pressed to an elderly woman’s silver hair.

Adrian stared at the television, his knuckles turning white around his weapon.

“Hello, Adrian,” Marcus’s voice echoed from the TV speakers. “I apologize for the theatrics. But Dominic pays significantly better than you do.”

Mrs. Keene looked terrified, but she sat rigidly upright, her tired blue eyes staring defiantly into the camera. She didn’t beg. She had spent her life surviving hard men.

“What do you want, Marcus?” Adrian demanded, though he knew the man couldn’t hear him.

But Carlo, bleeding on our living room floor, laughed. “He wants the deeds, Adrian. The deeds to the harbor docks. Dominic wants the shipping lanes.”

Adrian had spent five years turning his family’s illegal operations into legitimate shipping businesses. The docks were the crown jewel. If Dominic Rossi took them, the Belluccis were finished, and the city would be flooded with contraband.

I looked at my father. He nodded at me, a silent reassurance that he was okay.

“We have to go back,” I told Adrian.

“No,” Adrian said, his voice dropping to a terrifying, calculating frequency. “If we go back, he kills her. We need leverage.”

Adrian grabbed Carlo by the collar and dragged him toward the kitchen, throwing him into a chair.

“Where is Francesca?” Adrian asked, pressing the barrel of his gun to Carlo’s knee.

“I told you, we don’t have her!” Carlo yelled, panic finally setting in. “She was never in the van! Sloane lied to you!”

I frowned. “Sloane said Francesca stormed out the back stairs. But her coat and medical bracelet were in the sitting room. The blood was in the sitting room.”

“Sloane didn’t hurt her,” Carlo spat. “We were supposed to snatch Francesca. But when my guys got up to the sitting room, she was already gone. Someone else took her.”

Adrian stared at him. “Who?”

“I don’t know! We panicked. We cut my arm, smeared some blood on the chair to make it look like a hit, and ran!”

The reversal spun the entire night on its head. Sloane was a traitor. Marcus was a mole. Dominic Rossi was invading the mansion.

But none of them had Francesca.

“Mr. Bellucci,” I said urgently.

I walked over to Carlo’s discarded tactical jacket on the floor. Sticking out of the interior pocket was a folded piece of thick parchment paper.

I pulled it out and opened it.

It wasn’t a map or a hit list. It was a child’s drawing. Done in bright, messy crayons.

It showed a woman with long dark hair, holding hands with a little boy. At the top, written in clumsy, childish letters, were the words:

To Mommy Francesca. From Leo.

I handed the paper to Adrian.

He stared at the drawing, his breath hitching. “Francesca… she has a son?”

Carlo let out a weak chuckle. “Yeah. A five-year-old bastard. Dominic found out about the kid last month. That’s why your sister came to the mansion tonight, Adrian. She didn’t come to make peace. She came to beg you for the ransom money.”

Adrian’s face went entirely blank. A dangerous, deadly blankness. His estranged sister hadn’t abandoned him out of spite. She had been terrified, fighting a war alone to protect a child he didn’t even know existed.

“Where is the boy?” Adrian asked softly.

“Pier 4,” Carlo answered, sweating profusely. “Dominic’s holding him in a shipping container. He told Francesca if she didn’t deliver the money tonight, the kid goes into the harbor.”

Adrian lowered the gun. He didn’t shoot Carlo. He just looked at my father.

“Mr. Miller,” Adrian said respectfully. “Can you hold this trash here until the police arrive?”

My father tightened his grip on his broken cane. “With pleasure.”

Adrian turned to me. “Grace. We are not going back to the mansion. We are going to Pier 4.”

I nodded without hesitation. “I know Pier 4. My dad poured the concrete foundations there ten years ago. I used to bring him lunch. I know the blind spots.”

Adrian looked at me, a deep respect forming in his eyes.

We rushed out to the SUV. As Adrian slammed the SUV into gear, my phone buzzed again.

It was a text from an unknown number.

I opened it, and my stomach plummeted.

It was a picture of Sloane Hart. She was bleeding from the head, tied to the steering wheel of the catering van we had just seen.

And beneath the picture was one sentence:

“If you want to save the little boy, you have to choose: let the mother die in the mansion, or let the fiancée burn in the van.”

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