Chapter 3 – The Broken Pocket Watch
“Ask your uncle Dante.”
The name echoed like a gunshot in the grand dining room.
All eyes instantly snapped to Dante DeLuca, Roman’s father’s younger brother. Dante was a man of impeccable taste, wearing a bespoke charcoal suit, his silver hair perfectly styled. He had been the family’s chief financial officer for two decades, the quiet, steady hand behind the DeLuca empire.
Dante didn’t flinch. He didn’t drop his glass. He slowly swallowed his scotch and set the crystal tumbler on the table with a soft clink.
“This is absurd,” Dante said, his voice smooth and entirely unbothered. He looked at Roman with an expression of deep pity. “Roman, you cannot possibly believe the word of a dying hitman over your own blood.”
“My own blood is currently being held hostage by Marcus Vale,” Roman shot back, his hand clenching around his mother’s plastic hospital bracelet. “A man you’ve done business with for twenty years.”
“To keep the peace!” Dante argued, standing up gracefully. “I brokered the truce between our families after your mother died. I negotiated this very wedding to ensure our survival. And this man—” he pointed a manicured finger at Peter “—is trying to tear us apart from the inside.”
Serena, still held by the guards, suddenly stopped crying. She stared at Dante, her eyes wide with a horrific realization.
“It was you,” Serena whispered. “When my father told me he had a partner inside the DeLuca house… he meant you.”
Dante’s calm facade slipped for a fraction of a second. “Shut up, you hysterical child.”
“Don’t speak to her like that,” Roman snarled, stepping between Dante and Serena. He didn’t love his fiancée, but he wasn’t going to let his uncle intimidate his son’s captor.
Roman looked at his uncle. “Where were you the night my mother died, Dante?”
“I was in Chicago on family business,” Dante recited perfectly. “The police verified my alibi. The flights were documented. You know this, Roman. You were there when the detectives questioned me.”
“He’s lying,” Sofia DeLuca’s voice sliced through the tension.
The blind matriarch stood tall, leaning slightly on her silver-tipped cane. She turned her sightless eyes directly toward the spot where Dante was standing.
“Sofia, please,” Dante said gently, patronizingly. “Your memory of that night is trauma-induced. You were struck in the head.”
“I may have lost my eyes, Dante, but my ears work perfectly,” Sofia said, her voice shaking with twenty-four years of suppressed grief. “When the men broke in, they cut the power to the house. It was pitch black. But before the man struck me… before I fell to the floor… I heard a sound in the hallway outside my daughter’s room.”
The room was deathly quiet. I held my breath, watching the old woman summon the darkest memory of her life.
“I smelled almonds on my daughter’s breath earlier that day,” Sofia continued. “Arsenic. And in the hallway that night, right before she was killed, I heard a ticking.”
Dante’s jaw tightened.
“A very specific ticking,” Sofia said. “A mechanical stutter. Tick-tick… pause… tick.”
I looked at Roman. He was staring at Dante’s vest pocket.
“My husband’s gold pocket watch,” Sofia whispered. “The one you inherited when he died, Dante. The one that was dropped and broken the day of his funeral, causing the gears to permanently stutter.”
Dante’s hand instinctively twitched toward his vest, a microscopic gesture of guilt that Roman caught instantly.
“You were in the house,” Roman realized, the betrayal physically gutting him. He pulled his firearm from his shoulder holster and aimed it directly at his uncle’s chest. “You unlocked the doors for them. You watched them kill her.”
The guests began to panic, chairs scraping against the marble floor as people scrambled away from the table.
“Roman, put the gun down!” Dante shouted, his smooth composure finally cracking.
“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t end you right now,” Roman said, his finger tightening on the trigger.
“Because if I die, the boy dies!” Dante screamed.
Roman froze.
Dante backed away slowly, raising his hands. “Marcus Vale doesn’t have the boy, Roman. I do.”
Serena let out a blood-curdling shriek. “You lied to me! My father said Leo was with him!”
“Your father is a fool who trusted me to hold the collateral,” Dante sneered. He looked back at Roman. “I have your son, Roman. He’s hidden in a location only I know. If I don’t check in every hour, my men have orders to throw him in the river.”
I felt a cold sweat break out on the back of my neck. Dante had cornered them entirely.
“What do you want?” Roman asked, lowering the gun just a fraction, the desperate love for a son he hadn’t even met overpowering his need for vengeance.
“I want the master key to the family’s offshore accounts,” Dante demanded. “And I want a helicopter on the roof in ten minutes. When I am safely in international airspace, I’ll tell you where the boy is.”
Before Roman could answer, a heavy, rhythmic thumping echoed from the grand foyer outside the dining room doors.
Thump. Step. Thump. Step.
The heavy oak doors slowly swung open.
Every gun in the room leveled at the entrance.
Standing in the doorway was a frail, older man wearing dark sunglasses, holding a white fiberglass cane.
I dropped my hands from Sofia’s chair. My heart entirely stopped.
“Dad?” I whispered.
My father, Thomas Dawson, stood in the doorway of the mafia boss’s mansion. He tilted his head, listening to the heavy silence of the room.
“Claire?” my father asked. “Are you safe?”
“Dad, what are you doing here?” I cried, running to him.
Dante DeLuca turned around, annoyed by the interruption. “Get this blind old fool out of here before I shoot him too.”
My father froze. His hands tightened around his white cane until his knuckles turned entirely white.
Slowly, Thomas took off his dark sunglasses. His sightless, scarred eyes stared straight ahead.
“I know that voice,” my father whispered, his voice trembling with an ancient hatred. “It’s been twenty-four years, but I’d know that arrogant voice anywhere.”
Dante frowned. “Who the hell are you?”
My father reached into the pocket of his worn jacket.
“My name is Detective Thomas Dawson,” my father said. “And I’m the man you blinded with battery acid twenty-four years ago to stop me from solving your sister-in-law’s murder.”
Share
