THE MAFIA BOSS WATCHED ME SERVE EVERY GUEST AT HIS ENGAGEMENT DINNER EXCEPT THE MAN IN THE GRAY SUIT

“Get up.”

I didn’t whisper. I hissed it.

The heavy boots were already in the living room. The floorboards groaned. There was no time to think, no time to plan. Survival instinct, honed by years of scraping by on the South Side, took over.

I grabbed Daniel’s arm and yanked him out of the closet. He didn’t fight me. He was trembling violently, but his face remained stubbornly blank.

“Fire escape,” I mouthed, pointing to the frosted glass window in the bedroom.

The footsteps grew louder. Thump. Thump. Whoever it was wasn’t trying to be quiet. They owned the building. They owned the night.

I shoved the rusty window up. It shrieked in protest.

“Hey!” a deep voice barked from the living room.

“Go!” I pushed Daniel out onto the rusted iron grate. The freezing wind whipped my hair across my face as I scrambled out behind him. I pulled the window shut just as the bedroom door kicked open.

Through the frosted glass, a massive silhouette loomed.

I grabbed Daniel’s hand and we ran down the metal stairs. Four flights. My lungs burned. The iron rattled dangerously beneath our weight.

When we hit the alley, I didn’t stop. I dragged him past overflowing dumpsters, slipping on black ice, until we burst out onto the next street. My beat-up Honda was parked halfway down the block.

“Get in the back. Keep your head down,” I ordered, unlocking the doors.

Daniel scrambled into the backseat, curling into a tight ball on the floorboards. I jumped into the driver’s seat, cranked the ignition, and peeled away from the curb without turning on my headlights until I was three streets away.

My hands were shaking so hard I could barely grip the steering wheel.

I glanced in the rearview mirror. No one was following us.

“Are you okay?” I asked, my voice cracking.

Silence from the back.

“Daniel. Are you hurt?”

Slowly, his small head popped up over the edge of the seat. He looked at me, those dark, calculating eyes piercing right through me.

“Who are you?” he asked. His voice didn’t sound like an eleven-year-old’s. It sounded like a soldier’s.

“My name is Emily. I work for—” I stopped. If I said Luca Moretti, would he run? “I work for a man who wants to find you.”

“My mom said never to go with strangers.”

“Your mom isn’t here right now, Daniel. I’m trying to keep you safe.”

“She’s dead.”

The words hit me like a physical blow. I slammed on the brakes, pulling the car into the empty parking lot of a closed 24-hour diner. I turned around in my seat.

“What did you say?”

Daniel didn’t cry. His jaw was set so hard it looked like it might snap. “She didn’t die in a car crash. That’s a lie they tell. She died last Tuesday. In a hospital. Her lungs stopped working.”

My mind spun. The business card. The train ticket. Luca’s story.

“But… the men in the gray suits. You said they took her.”

“They took her body,” Daniel said flatly. “From the morgue. So nobody would know she was gone. Then they came for me.”

A sick feeling washed over me. Vanessa wasn’t hiding a living woman. She was hiding a corpse. She was erasing the mother to isolate the child.

“Daniel,” I said softly. “Do you know who your father is?”

He looked away, staring out the frosty window at the neon sign of the diner.

“My mom said my dad was a monster. She said he threw us away because I wasn’t good enough.”

“That’s a lie.” The words tumbled out of my mouth before I could stop them. “He didn’t know you existed until tonight.”

Daniel looked back at me, his eyes narrowing. He reached into his jacket pocket. His small, dirty hand pulled something out and held it toward me.

“Then why did she have this?” he challenged.

I turned on the dome light of the car.

Dangling from the boy’s fingers was a heavy, ornate silver rosary.

I gasped.

I recognized it instantly. I had dusted the exact same rosary in Luca Moretti’s private chapel a dozen times.

“My mom said the monster gave it to her the day he told her to leave,” Daniel whispered, his voice finally breaking. “He gave her his mother’s beads and told her if she ever came back, he’d kill us both.”

I stared at the silver cross gleaming in the dim light.

Luca hadn’t been in the dark.

Or someone had used his most prized possession to convince Elena that he was.

My phone vibrated in the cup holder.

LUCA MORETTI.

I stared at the screen. I was trapped between a mob boss who might have threatened his own child, and a fiancée who was actively trying to destroy him.

I picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Emily,” Luca’s voice was like ice. “Where are you?”

“I have him,” I breathed.

A sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line.

“Bring him to the warehouse on 9th Street. Now.”

“No.”

Silence on the line. I had just defied the head of the Chicago syndicate.

“Mr. Moretti,” I said, my voice trembling but firm. “I don’t know who to trust. You need to come to me. Alone.”

I gave him the address of the diner.

I hung up before he could argue.

I looked back at Daniel. He was still holding the rosary, tracing the beads with his thumb.