Chapter 3 - The Wooden Rosary And The Bloodstain
The phone slipped from my sweaty fingers.
Before it could hit the marble floor, Luca caught it. He brought it to his ear, his eyes locked onto mine.
“Who is this?” Luca asked.
He listened for three seconds. I watched the color drain from his face, replaced by a cold, murderous pale. He ended the call and shoved the phone into his jacket pocket.
He didn’t address his guests. He didn’t look at Vanessa, who was still sobbing on the floor in her ruined red silk gown.
“Carlo,” Luca barked.
His underboss, a broad-shouldered man with silver hair and a tailored suit, stepped forward from the shadows of the dining room.
“Clear the room,” Luca ordered. “Hold Vanessa in the study. If she tries to leave, break her legs.”
Carlo nodded grimly.
Luca grabbed my arm. Not hard enough to hurt, but firm enough to tell me I had no choice. “Show me the clinic. Now.”
We moved through the back corridors of the mansion, avoiding the panicked whispers of the guests. We bypassed the grand driveway and went straight to the underground garage.
Luca didn’t wait for a driver. He tossed me into the passenger seat of a black armored SUV and slid behind the wheel. The massive engine roared to life, and we tore out into the rainy Chicago night.
“Who was on the phone, Luca?” I asked, my voice trembling so badly I barely recognized it. “Where is my dad?”
“That was Marco Rossi,” Luca said, his eyes fixed on the wet, slick roads. “The enforcer Vanessa was paying off.”
“Why does he have my father?”
“Because your father had my nephew,” Luca said, taking a sharp turn that threw me against the door. “And Rossi just realized how valuable that little boy is.”
I gripped the dashboard, trying to process the impossibility of my life. I was a housekeeper. I scrubbed toilets and polished silver to pay off my dad’s medical debts. My father was a sixty-year-old physical therapist with a bad back who liked gardening.
He couldn’t be involved with the mafia. He couldn’t be hiding a dead man’s child.
“My dad doesn’t know anything about the syndicate,” I pleaded. “He treats people who can’t afford insurance. That’s all!”
Luca glanced at me, his jaw set tight. “If Rossi has him, Emma, your father is already involved. Whether he wanted to be or not.”
It took us twenty minutes to reach Cicero. The rain was coming down in sheets, blurring the neon signs of the empty strip malls.
We pulled up to the faded brick building. The sign above the door read: Reed Physical Therapy.
The front door was shattered.
Glass glittered across the wet pavement like crushed diamonds.
“Stay behind me,” Luca ordered, drawing a heavy black handgun from his shoulder holster.
I ignored him and ran past him through the broken door. “Dad!”
The waiting room was destroyed. Chairs were overturned. The receptionist’s desk was splintered in half, files scattered everywhere.
I rushed down the narrow hallway toward the treatment rooms, my boots crunching on broken glass. “Dad, please!”
The back room was empty. The therapy tables were flipped. Medical supplies littered the linoleum floor.
I fell to my knees, my chest heaving, a sob tearing out of my throat. He was gone. The only family I had left in the world had been dragged into a nightmare because he tried to help a little boy.
Luca stepped into the room, his gun lowered, his eyes scanning the destruction.
“They took him,” I cried, covering my face.
Luca didn’t answer. He walked toward the corner of the room, near a small pile of overturned towels. He crouched down.
“Emma,” he said quietly.
I looked up.
Luca reached out and picked something up from the floor.
It was a wooden rosary. The beads were worn smooth from years of use, the silver crucifix slightly tarnished.
But it wasn’t just a rosary.
Smeared across the pale wooden beads was fresh, bright crimson blood.
Luca stared at it, his breathing shallow.
“This was my brother’s,” Luca whispered, his thumb tracing the bloody cross. “I put this around his neck in his casket before they buried him. How did it get here?”
That was the reversal.
The boy, Leo, didn’t just survive the crash. He was wearing the rosary from his father’s grave.
“Because the boy was in the car,” a voice said from the shadows of the hallway.
Luca spun around, leveling his gun.
Standing in the doorway, bleeding from a deep gash on his forehead, was my father.
“Dad!” I screamed, scrambling up from the floor and rushing to him.
He was clutching his ribs, leaning heavily against the doorframe. I wrapped my arms around him, terrified he was going to collapse.
Luca didn’t lower his weapon.
“Thomas Reed,” Luca said, his voice cold and commanding. “You have exactly ten seconds to tell me why you have my dead brother’s child, before I put a bullet in your knee.”
My father looked at Luca, coughing weakly.
“I didn’t take him, Luca,” my father rasped. “I saved him.”
“From who?”
My father met Luca’s terrifying gaze without flinching.
“From the person who cut your brother’s brake lines three years ago,” my father said.
He reached into his torn jacket and pulled out a heavy, gold pocket watch with a cracked glass face. He tossed it onto the treatment table.
Luca looked at the watch, and all the color drained from his face for the second time that night.
I recognized the crest engraved on the gold lid.
It was the Moretti family crest.
“That’s Carlo’s watch,” Luca breathed. His own underboss. The man currently holding Vanessa captive at the mansion.
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“Carlo didn’t just kill your brother,” my father said, slumping against the wall. “He sold the boy to the West Side to secure his own seat on the Commission. And tonight, he came to collect him.”
TITLE: The Pocket Watch And The Child’s Drawing
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