Chapter 5 - The Traitor’s Crest
The name at the bottom of the burned commitment petition was Robert Moretti.
Luca’s younger brother.
The brother Luca had pulled out of federal bankruptcy three years ago, the brother he had set up as CEO of the family’s maritime shipping line on Lake Michigan.
"Robert?" Nicholas stepped toward the desk, his voice cracking with shock. "Uncle Robert was behind this?"
Vanessa pulled her wrist from Nicholas’s grip, scrambling back against the mahogany desk, her cold composure returning like armor. She wiped a smudge of soot from her cheek and stood up, smoothing the front of her designer coat.
"Robert understands business," Vanessa sneered, her voice dripping with malice. "You’ve spent twenty years playing the old-world godfather, Luca. Refusing modern corporate restructuring, refusing to sell the riverfront terminals to international logistics firms, sitting on prime downtown real estate like a dragon on a pile of rusted coins! Robert knew that once you married me, the Bellini family would merge our logistics networks. But you refused to sign the transfer of Nicholas's trust!"
"Nicholas’s trust was created by his mother," Luca said, his voice terrifyingly calm. "Not a penny of it belongs to the Bellini family. Not one brick."
"Nicholas was overseas!" Vanessa shouted, gesturing wildly toward Nicholas. "He was supposed to die in that desert! That was the agreement Marcus made with his contacts in the division transport office! He was supposed to be assigned to high-risk logistics patrols until an IED took care of the problem!"
Nicholas stopped breathing.
The color drained from his face until he looked like a statue carved from gray stone. "You... you bribed my division transport officer?"
"You weren't supposed to come home with a child!" Vanessa screamed, her voice cracking the antique silence of the study. "You were supposed to be buried in Arlington with a bronze flag! Then Luca would have grieved, signed over the maritime shipping proxies to Robert, and Marcus and I would have controlled the entire Lake Michigan shipping corridor!"
She laughed, a sharp, hysterical sound.
"And then you walk up to the gate today like a ghost from the grave, holding a filthy little bastard girl by the hand! Do you know what kind of mess you created? Do you know what Marcus had to do to get that emergency custody warrant drawn up in two hours?"
She turned toward me, pointing a trembling, diamond-encrusted finger at my face.
"And you! You pathetic little maid! If you had just kept your mouth shut and stayed in the kitchen with your bruised fingers, the train would have left! Nicholas would have been arrested in St. Louis for kidnapping, the child would have disappeared into a state facility in Gary, Indiana under an alias, and nobody would have ever known!"
A heavy glass paperweight on the desk shattered.
Luca had picked it up and crushed it against the mahogany surface with bare-knuckle force, splintering the oak. A shard of glass cut his palm, and a drop of dark crimson dripped onto the yellow legal paper.
He didn't look at his hand. He looked at Vanessa.
"Marco," Luca said through the open doorway.
Marco appeared like an executioner, two armed guards flanking him in the hall.
"Take her to the lower cellar," Luca commanded. "Not the basement. The wine cellar beneath the cold storage. Take her phone, her rings, her coat, and her shoes. Lock the vault door. If she screams, turn off the ventilation for ten minutes at a time."
"Luca!" Vanessa’s voice turned into a shrill shriek as Marco caught her by both upper arms, lifting her off her designer heels. "You can't do this to me! My father—"
"Your father will receive a wooden crate at his front door at six o'clock tomorrow morning," Luca interrupted, his voice dropping into a register that made the windowpanes rattle. "Inside that crate will be every piece of jewelry I bought you, your signed confession regarding the attempted murder of an active-duty American soldier, and the severed river lease for every dock your family owns between here and Milwaukee. If your father makes one telephone call to the press or the police, Robert won't be the only one facing federal prison for maritime conspiracy."
Marco dragged her out into the hallway. Her screams and the scraping of her fingernails against the paneled corridor faded down the stairs until the heavy steel door of the lower level slammed shut with a muffled thud.
Silence returned to the study.
The only sound was the crackle of the dying fire and Nicholas’s ragged, uneven breathing.
Nicholas walked over to the desk. He picked up the burned corner of the yellow paper, his thumb running over his uncle’s signature.
"Uncle Robert," Nicholas murmured. "He gave me a gold compass before I shipped out. He told me to keep my head down and come home safe."
"He wanted the trust, Nick," Luca said softly, stepping behind his son. "Your mother left fifty million dollars in commercial riverfront bonds in your name, unlocked on your twenty-fifth birthday. Next month. If you were dead, or legally incapacitated by an asylum commitment, the entire portfolio defaulted to Robert as the secondary executor."
Luca reached into his pocket and pulled out a clean white handkerchief, wrapping it around his bleeding palm. "I was blind. I was so lonely in this empty house that I let a viper crawl into my bed and call herself my wife."
He looked at Nicholas with eyes that were begging for mercy. "Nick... please. Look at me."
Nicholas turned slowly. His fatigue jacket was covered in station grime, his hair was matted with rain, and his jaw was purple from Marcus’s guard’s ring. But his eyes were clear, piercing, and cold.
"You let them forge your letterhead, Dad," Nicholas said, his voice trembling with a grief that went deeper than anger. "You let them use your seal to destroy my military career. I spent four years defending this country, and I came home with a dishonorable discharge on my record because someone in your office pressed your stamp onto a lie."
"I will fix it," Luca said desperately. "I know the Secretary of the Army. I know the governor. I will have your record expunged by noon tomorrow!"
"You can't expunge four months in a military stockade in Germany, Dad!" Nicholas shouted, the tears finally spilling over his lashes. "You can't expunge the nights Lily cried herself to sleep on a cot in a holding barracks because they treated her father like a deserter! You think money fixes that? You think having your private doctor give her soup wipes out what happened at that gate?"
From the doorway, a small voice broke the tension like a glass ornament dropping on stone.
"Daddy?"
We all turned.
Dr. Rossi stood in the hall holding Lily’s hand. She was dressed in an oversized gray cashmere sweater that must have belonged to Luca as a teenager, the sleeves rolled up four times over her tiny wrists. She held a steaming mug of hot chocolate with two massive white marshmallows floating on top, and her little face was clean, her cheeks flushed pink from the library fire.
She looked past Nicholas. She looked past Dr. Rossi.
Her eyes settled on the aluminum brace on my wrist. Then she looked up at Luca, who was standing in the center of the room with his hand wrapped in a bloody handkerchief.
Lily let go of Dr. Rossi’s fingers. She walked slowly across the heavy oriental rug, her small stocking feet silent on the wool, until she was standing right in front of Luca.
She looked down at his bleeding hand.
Then, with the complete, terrifying innocence of a four-year-old child, she reached into the deep pocket of the oversized sweater and pulled out a small, crumpled plastic object.
A cartoon band-aid with bright yellow smiley faces.
She peeled the paper backing off with her tiny fingernails, took Luca’s massive, trembling hand in her small ones, and pressed the band-aid carefully over the cut across his knuckles.
"Don't cry, mister," Lily whispered, looking up into his face with big, serious eyes. "My daddy has owies too. You just have to blow on it."
May you like
Luca Moretti—the man who controlled half the shipping lanes in the Midwest, the man who had terrified politicians for thirty years—fell to both knees on the study floor and wept like a child.
***
