Chapter 7 – THE GHOST IN THE BASEMENT HAD MY EYES

I couldn’t breathe.

I stood in the doorway of the damp, freezing cellar, the hammer slipping from my fingers and clattering onto the concrete floor.

The young woman on the cot didn’t move. She was incredibly thin, wearing an oversized, faded grey sweater. Her blonde hair was dull and matted, falling over shoulders that trembled with a permanent, deep-seated chill.

But beneath the grime and the exhaustion, her face was an absolute mirror of mine at twenty-three.

“Charlotte?” I whispered. The name felt foreign on my tongue. I had only ever spoken it to a gravestone.

The girl shrank back against the damp brick wall, pulling her knees to her chest. Her green eyes—my eyes—were wide with the feral terror of a caged animal.

“Don’t,” she rasped. Her voice was scratchy from years of underuse. “Don’t play games with me anymore. Just tell me what Vanessa wants.”

A sob tore out of my throat. It was a violent, ugly sound.

I dropped to my knees on the dirty floor and crawled toward her. I didn’t care about my ruined clothes. I didn’t care about the cold.

“I’m not Vanessa,” I cried, reaching out my trembling hands but stopping just inches from her knees, terrified to frighten her. “I’m Margaret. I’m… I’m your mother.”

Charlotte stared at me.

She looked at my face, tracing the lines around my eyes, the shape of my jaw. Her breath hitched. For ten years, she had been locked in the dark, told by Vanessa that her family had abandoned her.

“You’re not real,” Charlotte whispered, a tear finally escaping and cutting a clean line down her dirty cheek. “Vanessa said you knew I was down here. She said you and Dominic let her keep me here to pay off his debt.”

“No!” I shrieked, the horrific lie slicing through my heart like a scalpel. “Oh, my God, no. Charlotte, I thought you were dead. For twenty-three years, I mourned an empty box. I never knew. I swear on my life, I never knew.”

I couldn’t hold back anymore. I lunged forward and wrapped my arms around her frail body.

She went rigid for a second, but then, a dam broke inside her.

Charlotte buried her face in my shoulder and wailed. It was the cry of an abandoned child, echoing off the brick walls of the tomb she had lived in for a decade. I held her as fiercely as I could, burying my face in her hair, rocking her back and forth.

“I’ve got you,” I sobbed, kissing her head over and over. “Mommy’s got you. You’re safe. We’re leaving right now.”

I helped her stand. She was weak, her legs shaking beneath her. I wrapped my coat around her shoulders and guided her out of the cell.

As we reached the bottom of the wooden stairs leading back up to the kitchen, a heavy, rhythmic clapping echoed from above.

I froze, pulling Charlotte behind me.

Standing at the top of the stairs, looking down at us, was Paulie.

He held a suppressed pistol in his right hand.

Behind him stood Vanessa, fully dressed now in a sharp black suit, the fake pregnancy belly nowhere to be seen.

“Well, isn’t this a touching family reunion,” Vanessa sneered, leaning against the kitchen counter. “I must admit, Margaret, you moved faster than I anticipated. I didn’t think you’d figure out the key so quickly.”

“Let us go, Paulie,” I demanded, staring up at the massive enforcer who had worked for my husband for twenty years. “Dominic doesn’t know about this. When he finds out you helped her lock his daughter in a basement, he will skin you alive.”

Paulie didn’t blink. His dead eyes remained completely devoid of emotion.

“The Boss is getting old, Mrs. Moretti,” Paulie rumbled, his voice thick with betrayal. “He’s soft. He’s giving away the empire to a phantom baby. Vanessa offered me a seat at the head of the table. Dominic offered me a retirement watch.”

He pointed the gun directly at my chest.

“Back down the stairs,” Paulie ordered.

“No,” I said fiercely, shielding Charlotte with my body. “If you’re going to shoot me, do it. But I am not letting my daughter go back into that dark room.”

Vanessa laughed. “Oh, we’re not putting you in the cellar, Margaret. We’re putting you in the ground.”

Vanessa pulled a small, remote detonator from her pocket.

“Dominic is on his way back from the lawyer’s office right now,” Vanessa smiled wickedly. “When he walks through the front doors, a tragic gas leak is going to level this entire mansion. You, the long-lost daughter, and the grieving husband. All dead. And as the grieving, pregnant mistress who survived because she was at a spa day, I inherit everything.”

I stared at her. She wasn’t just stealing the money. She was wiping out the entire Moretti bloodline in one strike.

“You’re a monster,” I whispered.

“I’m a Bellini,” she corrected coldly.

Paulie raised the gun, aiming it at my head to force us down.

But suddenly, the heavy oak front doors of the mansion exploded inward with a deafening crash.

The sound of splintering wood echoed through the house.

Paulie whipped around, raising his gun toward the foyer.

“Put the gun down, Paulie.”

The voice boomed through the house like thunder.

It wasn’t Dominic.

It was Silas Vance. And behind him, carrying a pump-action shotgun, was Arty the pawnbroker.

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