Chapter 6 - THE GHOST IN THE WALLS
The line went dead.
Luca stood in the center of my son’s bedroom, staring at the black screen of his phone.
The empire he had built, the family he had protected, was being stolen from him in real-time, orchestrated by his own brother in his own dining room.
“We have to run,” I said, my voice trembling. I squeezed Leo’s hand tighter. “If Marcus is hunting you, and all the capos are against you, you can’t go back there.”
Luca looked at me. Then he looked at Leo, who was staring up at him with wide, frightened eyes.
“I’m not running, Emma,” Luca said, his voice terrifyingly calm. “If I run, Matteo becomes the Don. He will have the resources of the entire Chicago syndicate. He won’t stop searching until he finds me. And because you are the only witness to what happened in that study, he won’t stop until he finds you and your son, either.”
He was right.
You can’t outrun a ghost when it controls the shadows.
Luca reached into his pocket and pulled out his car keys. He tossed them to me.
“Take my car. Drive to my safehouse in Evanston. The address is programmed into the GPS. There is a man there named Silas. He is loyal to me, not the family. He will protect you and the boy.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“I’m going to walk into my dining room, put a bullet in my brother’s head, and ask the capos who wants to be next.”
“You’ll never make it to the dining room,” I said, my voice rising with desperation. “Marcus controls the security. He has twenty armed men patrolling the grounds. The second you step foot on the driveway, they’ll shoot you and claim you resisted.”
Luca’s jaw set. He knew it was a suicide mission.
But he was a Moretti. He would rather die on his feet than live on the run.
I looked down at Leo. Then I looked at the broken door of my apartment.
Matteo had sent men into my home. He had terrorized my child. He had ruined my life just to play a game of thrones with his brother.
A deep, unfamiliar anger burned away my fear.
“You can’t go through the front,” I said quietly.
Luca frowned. “I can’t go through the back, either. The cameras—”
“I clean the cameras,” I interrupted.
Luca stopped. He stared at me.
“Every Tuesday,” I said, my voice steadying. “I dust the lenses. I know the blind spots in the service corridors. I know the loose grate in the wine cellar that leads up to the servant stairwell. Marcus relies on the electronic sensors on the doors, but the old coal chute in the basement hasn’t been wired since the nineties. I throw out the kitchen scraps through there.”
Luca looked at me, truly seeing me for the first time.
Not as a maid. But as a weapon he hadn’t realized he possessed.
“You want me to sneak you into your own house,” I said.
“Emma, it’s too dangerous. If Marcus catches us—”
“He brought the danger to my son,” I said fiercely. I knelt down and looked Leo in the eyes. “Leo, baby, I need you to go with Sarah. You’re going to go for a ride in a really fast car, okay? Mommy will be right behind you.”
Leo hugged my neck tightly. “Promise?”
“I promise.”
I handed the keys to Sarah. “Get him out of here.”
Once they were gone, I turned back to Luca.
“Let’s go take out the trash.”
We took a cab to the edge of the Moretti estate, slipping out two blocks early to avoid the perimeter guards. The night air was biting, freezing the breath in our lungs.
We approached the massive stone wall bordering the back gardens.
I guided Luca through a gap in the wrought-iron gate that had been hidden by overgrown ivy for years. We stayed low, moving from shadow to shadow.
“Here,” I whispered, dropping to my knees near the foundation of the house.
I pulled away a heavy metal grate hidden behind a row of winter bushes. The old coal chute.
We slid down into the pitch-black basement.
It smelled of damp earth and old wine.
“The cameras in the cellar sweep every ten seconds,” I whispered, pressing my back against the cold stone wall. “Wait for the red light to hit the far wall, then run.”
Luca moved with deadly grace. We navigated the labyrinth of the servant quarters, completely bypassing Marcus’s high-tech security grid simply because the people who designed it never paid attention to the people who cleaned it.
We reached the heavy wooden door that opened into the hallway just outside the dining room.
I could hear voices through the wood.
Loud. Angry.
“He is a traitor!” Matteo’s voice echoed, dripping with manufactured outrage. “He murdered Don Carmine! If we do not hand Luca over to New York, they will wipe us out!”
“Where is Luca?” a gruff voice demanded. One of the capos.
“He fled!” Matteo lied effortlessly. “Like a coward. But look what I found in his safe.”
A collective gasp echoed in the room. He was showing them the bloody watch.
“And look at this,” Matteo continued, his voice lowering to a cruel purr.
I heard a plastic bag rustle.
“His maid was in on it. Emma. She helped him move the weapon. My men found this in her apartment. Her son’s winter coat. We suspect she took the boy and ran with Luca.”
My blood boiled. I reached for the door handle, but Luca’s hand clamped over mine.
He shook his head. Wait.
“If Luca is gone, the seat is empty,” another capo said. “Who leads us?”
“I will step up,” Matteo said, the triumph finally bleeding into his tone. “I will make the peace with New York.”
“No, you won’t.”
The voice didn’t come from Luca.
It came from inside the room.
It was Vanessa.
Silence fell over the dining room.
“Vanessa, step back,” Matteo warned, his voice suddenly tight.
“You want the truth?” Vanessa shouted, her voice echoing off the crystal chandeliers. “Matteo didn’t find that watch in Luca’s safe! He gave it to me! He forced me to plant it there! He has been holding my sister hostage for three weeks to force my hand!”
My heart pounded. Vanessa had finally broken.
“She’s hysterical,” Matteo sneered. “Marcus, escort my brother’s fiancée to her room.”
I heard heavy footsteps. Marcus.
“Don’t touch me!” Vanessa screamed.
Then, the sound of a gun racking filled the room.
But it wasn’t Marcus drawing his weapon.
May you like
It was Vanessa.
“My sister got out, Matteo,” Vanessa said, her voice shaking with adrenaline and hatred. “She called me five minutes ago. You have no leverage over me anymore. You’re a dead man.”
