Chapter 5 – THE PHOTOGRAPH IN THE FIREPLACE

“Put the gun down, Vanessa,” Luca said.

He didn’t raise his own weapon. He stayed crouched beside me, his body shielding mine from the doorway. His voice was terrifyingly calm, the voice of a man who had survived assassins before.

Vanessa laughed. It was a shrill, broken sound.

“You think you’re so smart, Luca,” she spat, gripping her pistol tighter. “You think you figured it all out because you found an old watch? My father planned this for a decade. The engagement, the merged accounts, the charity fraud—it was all a distraction.”

“A distraction from what?” Luca asked, slowly shifting his weight.

“From her,” Vanessa said, pointing the gun at me. “As long as a legitimate Moretti heir exists outside the syndicate, our takeover could be challenged by the Commission. My father couldn’t find Maria for twenty-eight years. But then, you did the hard work for us.”

I looked at her, confused and terrified. “What do you mean?”

“Your mother got sick, Emma,” Vanessa sneered. “She went to a free clinic. Her blood was drawn. Her DNA was entered into a state registry. My father has people in the health department. The computer flagged a familial match to the old Moretti DNA on file.”

My stomach turned to ice. My mother’s illness hadn’t just weakened her lungs. It had broadcast our location to the monsters she had spent her life running from.

“That’s why you hired her,” Luca said, realization dawning on him. “You didn’t want a housekeeper. You wanted to keep Maria’s daughter right where you could see her until you were ready to strike.”

“Keep your enemies close,” Vanessa smiled. “And now, the diversion is over. My father is going to wipe out your guards outside, and I am going to end the Moretti line in this room.”

She cocked the hammer of her pistol.

“I wouldn’t do that,” I said.

My voice didn’t shake. I surprised myself. The fear was suddenly replaced by a cold, hard protective instinct. I was a Moretti, apparently. And I was tired of being treated like a pawn.

Vanessa narrowed her eyes. “Shut up, maid.”

“If you shoot him, your father goes to federal prison for the rest of his life,” I said, slowly standing up from behind the desk.

Luca grabbed my ankle, trying to pull me back down, but I stepped away from him.

“What are you talking about?” Vanessa demanded.

“The offshore routing numbers,” I said, nodding toward the forged bank statements still sitting on the edge of the desk. “You were sloppy, Vanessa. You forged documents to frame my mother for embezzlement. But you didn’t just use her name. You used the account numbers from your father’s personal Cayman Island trusts to move the money.”

Vanessa’s face paled slightly. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I have a photographic memory for numbers,” I bluffed smoothly, praying my poker face held. “I saw the routing codes. If I die tonight, those numbers are automatically emailed to the FBI by a dead-man’s switch I set up on my phone an hour ago. They will trace the stolen charity funds directly to Marcus Bellini’s private accounts.”

Vanessa hesitated. Her gun wavered.

She wasn’t a killer. She was a spoiled heiress playing a dangerous game, and she had just realized she might have accidentally handed the feds the keys to her father’s empire.

In that split second of hesitation, Luca moved.

He didn’t shoot her. He surged forward, grabbing a heavy brass candlestick from the desk and hurling it at her.

It struck Vanessa’s wrist with a sickening crack.

She screamed, dropping the pistol.

Luca closed the distance in two strides, tackling her to the floor and kicking the weapon under the sofa. He pinned her arms behind her back, pulling a zip-tie from his pocket—a habit of a man prepared for betrayal.

“Daniel!” Luca roared toward the hallway.

Heavy footsteps pounded up the stairs. Daniel and another guard burst into the room, their weapons drawn.

“Sir, the front gates are holding, but Bellini is preparing to ram them,” Daniel reported, eyeing Vanessa on the floor.

“Take her to the basement vault. Do not let her out,” Luca ordered. He turned to me, his chest heaving. “That was incredibly stupid, Emma. You don’t have a dead-man’s switch.”

“No,” I admitted, my knees finally giving out as I sank into the armchair. “But she didn’t know that.”

Luca actually smiled. A brief, fierce look of pride. “You definitely have the Moretti blood.”

He walked over to the fireplace. Above the mantle hung a large, framed oil painting of a Venetian landscape. Luca reached behind the heavy gold frame and pressed a hidden button.

The painting swung open on silent hinges, revealing a dark, hidden passageway built into the stone walls of the mansion.

“We need to get you out of here,” Luca said. “If Bellini breaches the gates, this house becomes a warzone.”

“I’m not leaving without my mother,” I said fiercely. “If they found me, they found her apartment.”

Luca paused. He reached into his pocket and pulled his phone out.

“Daniel,” Luca said into the radio on his lapel. “Send a retrieval team to the South Side immediately. Secure Sarah Sullivan. Bring her to the safe house.”

Static crackled on the radio. Then, a different voice answered.

It wasn’t Daniel.

It was a deep, gravelly voice that made the hairs on my arms stand up.

“Save your men the trip, Luca,” Marcus Bellini said over the stolen radio. “I already picked Maria up. And if you don’t open those front gates in sixty seconds, I’m going to send her back to you in pieces.”

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