Chapter 4 - The Blueprint Under The Bed
“A diamond bracelet?” Luca asked, his voice smooth as glass.
“Yes,” Vanessa sighed. “It’s devastating. I must have left it in the kitchen. She’s the only one who was back there. Send someone to her apartment, Luca. We can’t let her get away with it.”
She didn’t want the police. She wanted my address.
She wanted my son.
“I’ll handle it, Vanessa,” Luca said. “Go back to our guests.”
He hung up.
I couldn’t breathe. The room was spinning. “She wants Leo. Why does she want Leo? She doesn’t even know him!”
Luca shoved the custody document into his suit jacket and handed me the rosary.
“Where is your son right now?”
“At my apartment. With Mrs. Higgins, my neighbor.”
“Let’s go.”
We didn’t take the driveway. Luca led me through the kitchen gardens, slipping into a sleek black SUV parked near the security gates.
He drove like a man possessed. The Chicago streetlights blurred into golden streaks against the windshield.
My hands shook the entire twenty-minute ride.
If Aaron Pike was a desperate man in debt, kidnapping the child of an employee to blackmail the Moretti estate was exactly the kind of leverage he would need.
We pulled up to my rundown apartment building.
I scrambled out of the car before it was fully parked, ignoring the shooting pain in my knee. I ran up the two flights of stairs.
Apartment 3B.
The front door was wide open.
The deadbolt was splintered.
“Leo!” I screamed, rushing inside.
The living room was trashed. The couch cushions were ripped apart. The kitchen drawers were dumped on the floor.
Mrs. Higgins was sitting on the floor, holding her head, groaning.
“Claire,” the old woman mumbled. “A man... he kicked the door. He was looking for papers.”
“Where is my son?!”
Luca drew his gun, sweeping the small apartment.
“Bedroom,” he commanded.
I ran to my tiny bedroom. It was equally destroyed.
“Leo! Baby, please!” I dropped to my knees, pressing my face to the carpet.
A small sniffle came from the darkness.
Under my bed, pushed all the way against the far corner, was a pair of glowing six-year-old eyes.
“Mommy?”
“Oh, God.” I reached under and pulled him into my arms, weeping into his hair. “Are you hurt? Did he touch you?”
“I hid in the vent space like you taught me,” Leo whispered, his little hands gripping my shirt. “He didn’t see me. But he dropped something when he was throwing your books.”
Leo opened his small, sweaty fist.
My breath caught.
Luca stepped into the doorway, lowering his weapon. His eyes locked onto the object in my son’s hand.
It was a heavy, solid gold pocket watch.
Engraved on the front was a crest. The Moretti Crest.
“That’s my father’s watch,” Luca whispered. “It’s been missing for five years.”
But that wasn’t what made the blood drain from my face.
Folded tightly beneath the watch in Leo’s hand was a torn piece of architectural paper.
I carefully unrolled it.
It was a blueprint. But not of the estate. It was a blueprint of the First National Bank vault downtown.
And in the margins, written in familiar, frantic handwriting, were the security codes.
“This handwriting,” I choked out, staring at the numbers. “It’s my husband’s.”
Luca froze. “Your husband?”
“David. He died three years ago.”
Luca slowly stepped into the room. His jaw tightened, the muscles ticking beneath his skin.
“Your husband was David Dawson?”
“Yes.”
Luca raised his gun, aiming it directly at my chest.
May you like
“David Dawson,” Luca said, his voice deadly hollow, “was the man who gave the codes to the assassins who murdered my father.”
TITLE: The Sins Of The Father
