Chapter 6 - THE RANSOM
My knees gave out. I would have hit the floor if Luca hadn’t caught my arm.
“Emma. Look at me,” Luca commanded, his grip firm and grounding. “What is it?”
I shoved the phone into his hand, my vision blurring with panic. “Sam. They have my little brother, Sam. He was supposed to be at his dorm tonight. Oh God, they have him.”
Luca read the text. The muscles in his jaw ticked. He handed the phone to Marco, who had just returned to the ballroom after handing Vanessa to the authorities.
“Trace this. Now,” Luca barked. “Get every man we have on the streets. Nobody touches her brother.”
Marco nodded once and sprinted out.
I was hyperventilating. “The text said they want the deed to the Gold Coast mansion. Why do they want a house deed?”
Uncle Joe wheeled himself closer, his face pale. Little Leo, sensing the tension, gripped the armrest of Joe’s chair tightly.
“It’s not just a deed to a house, Emma,” Joe explained softly. “The original deed to the Gold Coast mansion is a bearer document. It holds the rights not just to the land, but to the underground vaults beneath the city—the old smuggling tunnels the Moretti family built in the 1920s. The Romanos have wanted those tunnels for decades to move their shipments undetected.”
“Where is the deed?” I asked desperately, looking at Luca. “Can we just give it to them? I don’t care about tunnels! I just want Sam!”
Luca ran a hand through his dark hair. “I don’t have it.”
I stared at him. “What do you mean you don’t have it? It’s your house!”
“When my father died, he hid the original bearer deed,” Luca said, frustration bleeding into his voice. “He knew the Romanos would kill for it. He left me the legal title to live here, but the bearer document—the one that opens the vaults—has been missing for thirty-three years.”
Silence fell over us. If we didn’t have the deed, Sam was dead.
Then, a small voice broke the silence.
“Is it a paper with a red bird on it?”
We all looked down. Little Leo was pointing at the small red velvet pouch sitting on the table—the one Uncle Joe had brought in his lunchbox, the one that held the burned emerald earring.
“What did you say, Leo?” Luca asked gently, crouching down.
Leo pointed a small, pudgy finger at the velvet pouch. “When Uncle Joe was sleeping on the bus, I peeked inside his box. The red bag has a secret pocket in the back. I saw a paper with a red bird on it.”
Uncle Joe looked stunned. He grabbed the velvet pouch and ran his fingers along the inner lining. He found a tiny, nearly invisible slit in the fabric.
With trembling fingers, Joe pulled out a tightly folded, ancient piece of parchment.
He unfolded it on the table.
At the top, stamped in faded crimson ink, was a wax seal of a red falcon—the original seal of the Chicago registry.
It was the bearer deed.
Luca stared at it in disbelief. “My mother hid it in her jewelry pouch before she died. Joe… you’ve been carrying the most valuable document in Chicago in a lunchbox for three decades.”
“I had no idea,” Joe whispered.
I didn’t care about the history. I pointed at the paper. “We have it. Now we can trade it for Sam.”
“No,” Luca said, his voice turning cold and authoritative. “We don’t trade with the Romanos. They’ll take the deed and kill your brother anyway to leave no witnesses.”
“Then what do we do?!” I cried, tears spilling over.
May you like
Luca pulled his suit jacket off and tossed it onto a chair. He rolled up his sleeves, revealing dark ink tattoos wrapping around his forearms.
“We go to the docks,” Luca said, pulling a sleek black handgun from a hidden holster in the small of his back. “And we burn them down.”
