Chapter 7 - THE PHOTOGRAPH ON THE HARBOR MASTER'S DESK
“Wait!” Luca shouted, his voice echoing off the glass walls of the office.
Adrian didn’t pull the trigger, but he didn’t lower the gun either. He looked at Luca, an amused, dark glint in his eye.
“You want to beg for the life of the man who murdered your father, Luca?” Adrian mocked. “That’s incredibly pathetic, even for you.”
“He didn’t murder him,” Luca said, taking a slow, deliberate step forward.
One of the guards instantly slammed the butt of his rifle into the back of Luca’s knees. Luca went down hard, hitting the floorboards with a sickening thud, but he didn’t break eye contact with Adrian.
“My father ordered the bombing himself,” Luca gasped, fighting through the pain to kneel upright.
The room went dead silent.
Thomas, bleeding in the chair, squeezed his eyes shut. “Don’t, Luca. Let him kill me. It’s better this way.”
“No,” Luca said fiercely. He reached into his soaked jacket and pulled out the faded train ticket my mother had given him. He tossed it onto the floor at Adrian’s feet.
“Look at the ticket, Adrian,” Luca demanded.
Adrian glanced down at the old piece of paper.
“It’s a train ticket,” Adrian sneered. “So what?”
“Look at the date,” Luca commanded.
Adrian frowned. He nudged the ticket with the toe of his expensive shoe to read the ink.
“October 14th, 1997,” Adrian read aloud.
“My father died in a car bombing on October 12th, 1997,” Luca said, his voice ringing with absolute certainty. “If Thomas killed my father, who bought that ticket two days later?”
Adrian froze. The gun pressed against Thomas’s head wavered slightly.
“It’s a fake,” Adrian whispered, though the doubt in his eyes was painfully obvious.
“It’s real,” a new voice said from the doorway.
Everyone turned.
Standing in the entrance of the office was Daniel. Luca’s treacherous head of security.
But Daniel wasn’t pointing a gun at Luca anymore. He was holding a worn, leather-bound photograph album.
“Daniel,” Adrian warned, his voice turning lethal. “What are you doing? I told you to secure the perimeter.”
“I secured my daughter,” Daniel said, his face pale but resolute. “Your men guarding her in Boston were sloppy. My team pulled her out ten minutes ago. You have no leverage over me anymore, Adrian.”
Adrian’s jaw tightened. He shifted his aim toward Daniel.
“Then you die with them.”
“Before you shoot,” Daniel said, tossing the leather album onto the harbor master’s desk, “look at the photo on the first page.”
Adrian hesitated. He gestured for one of his guards to open the album.
The guard flipped the heavy leather cover and stared at the photograph. He looked up at Adrian, his expression bewildered.
“Boss,” the guard said nervously. “You need to see this.”
Adrian slowly backed away from Thomas, keeping his gun raised, and looked down at the desk.
The photograph showed Luca’s father, Carlo Moretti. He looked older, graying, and he was sitting on a porch in Florida.
And the date stamped in the corner of the photograph was 2005. Eight years after the car bombing.
“He faked his death,” Adrian whispered, the blood draining from his face.
“Yes,” Luca said, rising slowly to his feet. “My father knew the rival families were closing in. He knew they would never stop hunting him, and they would never stop hunting you, Adrian. So he paid Thomas to rig his car to explode, and he walked away.”
“Liar!” Adrian screamed, sweeping the photograph off the desk in a blind rage. “He abandoned me!”
“He saved you!” Thomas yelled, his voice raw and broken. “Carlo gave up his empire, his name, and his oldest son just so you could grow up in hiding without a target on your back! He paid me to watch over you because he loved you!”
Adrian stumbled backward, his gun hand shaking violently. His entire narrative—the revenge, the anger, the justification for everything he had done—was collapsing in front of him.
“Where is he?” Adrian demanded, looking wildly at Thomas. “Where is he now?”
Thomas lowered his head, tears mixing with the blood on his face.
“He died of lung cancer three years ago, Adrian. In a hospice in Miami. I was holding his hand. His last words were asking if you were safe.”
Adrian stared at the floor, the silver pistol dropping limply to his side. He looked like a little boy who had just realized the monster under his bed had been protecting him all along.
But the moment of realization didn’t bring peace. It brought madness.
Adrian looked up, his eyes entirely hollow.
“He chose to die alone rather than come back for me,” Adrian whispered.
He raised his gun, pointing it directly at Luca’s chest.
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“Kill them all,” Adrian ordered his men.
Before anyone could pull a trigger, the glass windows of the harbor master’s office exploded inward.
