Chapter 3 - THE CREST IN THE SILVER LOCKET
I stared at the silver locket on the floor.
The lion holding a shield.
My mother had given me this necklace the day before she died. She told me it was a cheap trinket from a pawn shop. She told me never to take it off.
But it wasn't cheap.
It was the Moretti family crest.
“Move,” Luca ordered, his voice cutting through my shock.
He didn't wait. He grabbed my arm and pulled me down the dark service corridor just as the first tactical flashlight swept across the wall where we had been standing.
A bullet slammed into the wood paneling, inches from my head.
The sound was deafening.
Luca spun around, firing two shots back down the hallway.
A man cried out. A heavy body hit the floor.
“Keep moving!” Luca shouted.
I ran. I knew this house blindly. I knew which floorboards creaked and which doors locked from the inside.
I led him into the laundry sorting room and slammed the heavy oak door shut.
Luca threw the deadbolt.
We stood in the dark, surrounded by massive canvas laundry bins, both of us breathing heavily.
“Did they hit you?” Luca asked, pulling a small flashlight from his pocket.
“No.”
He shined the beam over me, checking for blood.
When he was satisfied I was unhurt, he looked at my hand.
I was gripping the silver locket so tightly my knuckles were white.
“What is that?” he asked softly.
I opened my trembling hand.
The beam of his flashlight hit the engraved lion and shield.
Luca stopped breathing.
He stepped closer. He didn't take the locket from me, but he traced the engraving with his thumb.
“Where did you get this, Rachel?”
“My mother,” I whispered. “She gave it to me ten years ago.”
“What was her name?”
“Sarah Hayes.”
Luca’s dark eyes widened. It was the first time I had ever seen the mafia boss look genuinely shocked.
“Sarah Hayes wasn't a real person,” Luca said. “That was an alias.”
“What?”
“Your mother’s real name was Sarah Moretti.”
My legs gave out.
I fell backward, catching myself against one of the canvas bins.
“No. My father was a mechanic. He died before I was born.”
“Your father was my older brother,” Luca said.
The words hit me like a physical blow.
“My brother Julian was murdered twenty-six years ago,” Luca explained, his voice thick with an emotion he rarely showed. “The Bellini family planted a bomb in his car. We thought his wife, Sarah, died with him. They never found her body. We thought the heat destroyed it.”
He looked at my face. He looked at my eyes.
“She didn't die,” Luca whispered. “She ran. She hid you to protect you from the war.”
I shook my head, unable to process the magnitude of the lie I had lived my entire life.
I wasn't a maid.
I was a Moretti.
I was his niece.
“Then why am I here?” I cried. “Why did the agency send me to clean this specific house?”
“Because someone found out who you were,” Luca said. His expression darkened. “Vanessa. She didn't hire you by accident. She wanted you close.”
“Why?”
“Because the library vault doesn't just need the brass key to open.” Luca looked at the locket in my hand. “It needs a biometric scan from a direct blood descendant of my father’s first bloodline. Julian's bloodline.”
My chest tightened.
“Vanessa didn't want the staff out of the way to protect them,” I realized aloud. “She wanted them out of the way so her men could take me down to the vault.”
Footsteps slammed against the hardwood outside the laundry room.
Fists pounded against the heavy oak door.
“Open it up, Moretti!” a voice yelled. “We know she’s in there. Hand over the girl, and you walk away!”
Luca stood up. He checked his magazine again. Three bullets left.
“I lost my brother,” Luca said quietly, looking at me. “I am not losing you.”
He pointed toward a narrow laundry chute built into the wall.
“It leads directly to the basement,” Luca said. “It drops into the linen carts. Climb in.”
“What about you?”
“I'm going to buy you time.”
“They’ll kill you!”
“I am the Boss of Chicago,” Luca said, a terrifying, cold pride in his voice. “They can try.”
The hinges of the door began to splinter.
I didn't argue. I squeezed into the metal chute.
Before I slid down, I looked back at him.
“Luca.”
He turned.
“I'll meet you in the vault.”
I let go, sliding down into the pitch-black darkness.
I hit a pile of soft linens with a muffled thud.
I scrambled out of the cart, landing on the cold concrete floor of the basement.
The basement was massive, filled with old furniture, wine racks, and boiler equipment.
I knew exactly where the vault was.
I ran toward the east wall, where a heavy steel door was hidden behind a false wine rack.
But as I rounded the corner, I stopped dead in my tracks.
The vault door was already exposed.
And standing in front of it, holding a suppressed pistol, wasn't one of the tactical men.
It was a little boy.
He was maybe six years old, wearing dinosaur pajamas, tears streaming down his face.
And behind him, holding a knife to the child's throat, was Vanessa Bellini.
“You took the chute,” Vanessa smiled, blood on her designer gown. “I thought you might.”
She pressed the knife tighter against the little boy's skin.
May you like
“Rachel, meet Leo,” Vanessa said. “Luca’s son. Now, open the door, or the boy dies.”
TITLE: THE BOY IN THE DINOSAUR PAJAMAS
