Chapter 2 - THE HIDDEN PHOTOGRAPH
“They didn’t want my money,” Harper repeated, her voice a fragile rasp against the sterile hum of the hospital room.
Dante did not move. He did not ask her to hurry.
“They took my bag, dumped my wallet on the wet pavement, and kicked my cash into the gutter,” she said, closing her good eye as a wave of pain washed over her. “They were looking for something specific. And they found it.”
“What did they take, Harper?”
“A photograph.”
Dante’s brow furrowed slightly. In their world, photographs were leverage. They were proof of infidelity, evidence of a bribe, or documentation of a murder.
“Who was in the picture?” Dante asked, his mind already cycling through the politicians and rival captains she interacted with daily.
Harper swallowed hard. She didn’t look at him.
“A little boy.”
The silence in the room became absolute.
Dante stared at the woman who had managed his entire life for three years. He knew her coffee order, her pristine credit score, and her ruthless efficiency. He did not know she had a child.
“Your son?” Dante asked quietly.
“Yes,” Harper whispered, a single tear slipping past the bandages on her cheek. “His name is Leo. He’s six years old.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because of who his father was.”
Dante stood up. The heavy wool of his overcoat rustled. The air in the room suddenly felt dangerously thin.
“Harper. Who is the father?”
She finally looked up at him. Her single, unbruised eye was filled with a terror she had never shown in the boardroom.
“Your brother, Dante.”
The floor beneath Dante seemed to vanish.
His younger brother, Julian, had been murdered seven years ago. Gunned down in a restaurant parking lot in what everyone assumed was a random carjacking. Julian had been the soft one, the brother who wanted nothing to do with the syndicate, the one who wanted to be an architect.
“Julian?” Dante breathed. The name felt foreign on his tongue.
“We were engaged in secret,” Harper said, her voice trembling. “He wanted to leave the city. He wanted to change his name and take me away before you or your father found out. But they killed him before we could run.”
Dante’s chest tightened. “You were pregnant.”
“I found out the day after his funeral,” she sobbed. “I changed my last name. I moved. I hid. Three years later, when my savings ran out, I applied to be your secretary. I needed to be close to you. I needed to know if your enemies were ever looking for Julian’s bloodline.”
It was a masterstroke of survival. Hide the heir to the Moretti empire right under the boss’s nose. She had sat outside his office, typing his emails, while raising his brother’s ghost in secret.
“The men in the alley,” Dante said, his voice dropping to a lethal, vibrating pitch. “They took his picture.”
“Yes.”
“Did they say anything else?”
Harper shuddered. “The man in the back seat rolled down the window. He looked at the photo, then looked at me. He said, ‘Tell Dante Moretti the debt is due.’”
Dante turned away from the bed.
The assault wasn’t a random message. It was a targeted declaration of war. They hadn’t killed Harper because they needed her to deliver the threat. They knew about the boy.
“Where is Leo right now?” Dante demanded, pulling his encrypted phone from his pocket.
“He’s at home. With my mother. Dante, please, if they know where I live—”
“Give me the address.”
She rattled off an address in the suburbs, twenty miles outside the city limits.
Dante pressed a button on his phone. “Marco. I need three cars at West End General. Secure the perimeter. Nobody enters Trauma 3. Nobody.”
He hung up and looked back at Harper.
“I am going to get him,” Dante promised.
“Dante,” she cried out as he reached the door.
He stopped.
“The men who took the picture,” Harper gasped, fighting through the sedatives. “One of them dropped something in the struggle. It’s in my coat pocket. The police bagged my clothes.”
Dante walked to the plastic evidence bag resting on the visitor’s chair. He ripped it open, bypassing the blood-stained navy blouse, and reached into the pocket of her ruined trench coat.
His fingers brushed against cold, heavy metal.
He pulled it out.
It was a silver pocket watch. The glass face was heavily cracked, and the hands were frozen exactly at midnight.
Dante stared at it, the blood freezing in his veins.
He turned the watch over. Engraved into the tarnished silver were three initials.
C.R.M.
It wasn’t an enemy’s watch.
It belonged to Carlo Romano Moretti.
Dante’s uncle. The man who had raised him. The man who was currently sitting in a federal penitentiary three states away.
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Dante stared at the watch, realizing with horrifying clarity that the threat wasn’t coming from outside his family.
It was coming from inside his own blood.
