Chapter 3 - The Photograph Inside The Empty Wallet
My father’s maintenance log.
My mind raced back to the days before his stroke. He had kept hundreds of those yellow carbon-copy logs in his truck.
How did a dead child’s drawing end up on the back of my father’s paperwork?
“Marco,” Luca ordered, not taking his eyes off Vanessa. “Lock her in the library. Do not let her make a phone call.”
“Luca, you can’t do this!” Vanessa screamed as the heavy-set guard grabbed her arm. “I’m your fiancée!”
“You were,” Luca said coldly.
As Marco dragged her away, her high heels scraping against the marble floor, Luca turned to me.
“Where does your father live?”
“With me,” I said. “In a ground-floor apartment in Logan Square. My brother Tommy is supposed to be with him tonight.”
Luca pulled a set of car keys from his pocket.
“Call your brother.”
I pulled my cheap phone from my apron pocket with shaking hands.
I dialed Tommy’s number.
It rang three times. Then went to voicemail.
“He’s not answering,” I said, my voice cracking.
Tommy always answered. Always. Especially on nights I worked late.
“Let’s go,” Luca said.
We didn’t take the chauffeured town car. Luca took his personal SUV, a matte-black armored vehicle parked in the private garage.
He drove fast. The rain lashed against the windshield, the city lights blurring into streaks of yellow and red.
“Mr. Moretti,” I started, gripping the passenger door handle.
“Luca,” he corrected quietly, keeping his eyes on the wet road.
“Luca. Why did Vanessa say your son died?”
His jaw tightened.
“Six years ago, I was involved with a woman named Clara. She wasn’t part of my world. She was a teacher.”
His voice softened. It was the most human I had ever heard him sound.
“When she got pregnant, my family... objected. My father wanted me to marry Vanessa to merge our families’ real estate empires. Clara went into early labor. Vanessa arranged a private clinic. She told me Clara hemorrhaged. They both died.”
I stared at him. “You never saw the baby?”
“They told me he didn’t survive the surgery,” Luca said, his knuckles turning white on the steering wheel. “I buried a closed casket.”
My stomach twisted.
“And now you think he’s alive?”
“If he drew that picture on your father’s log... someone hid him.”
We pulled up to my apartment building.
It was a worn brick four-flat. The streetlights were flickering.
The front door to my unit was slightly ajar.
My heart dropped into my stomach.
I pushed the door open.
“Dad? Tommy?”
The living room was dark. The television was off.
My father’s recliner was empty.
The apartment had been tossed. Drawers were pulled out. Books were knocked off the shelves. The medical equipment my father used for his physical therapy was thrown across the rug.
“Dad!” I screamed, running toward the back bedrooms.
Empty.
Both of them.
Luca walked into the living room, his hand resting inside his suit jacket, near where I knew he carried a weapon.
“Emma,” he called out softly.
I came out of the hallway, tears streaming down my face. “They’re gone. Someone took them.”
Luca was standing near the small kitchen table.
“Did your father carry a wallet?”
“Yes. An old brown leather one.”
Luca pointed to the floor near the kitchen sink.
The wallet was lying open on the linoleum.
I rushed over and picked it up.
It was empty. The cash was gone, his ID was gone.
But something was stuck in the clear plastic sleeve where he usually kept a picture of my mother.
It was a photograph I had never seen before.
I pulled it out.
It was an old Polaroid, slightly faded.
It showed my father, twenty years younger, wearing a tailored black suit instead of his usual mechanic’s coveralls.
He was standing in front of a familiar lake house.
Next to him, with his arm around my father’s shoulder, was a man I recognized from the oil paintings in the Moretti mansion.
Lorenzo Moretti. Luca’s father.
“They knew each other,” Luca whispered, looking over my shoulder at the photo.
I shook my head. “No. My dad repaired elevators. He was just a blue-collar worker. He didn’t know billionaires.”
“Emma,” Luca said gently. “My father didn’t pose for pictures with mechanics.”
He took the photograph from my trembling fingers.
He turned it over.
Written on the back, in faded black ink, were two words.
My Enforcer.
The breath left my lungs.
My gentle, quiet father. The man who taught me how to fish, who struggled to pay our mortgage.
He was the Moretti family’s enforcer?
Before I could process it, Luca’s phone buzzed in his pocket.
He answered it on speaker.
“Boss,” Marco’s voice came through, sounding tense. “We have a problem.”
“What is it?”
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“James Rinaldi just showed up at the front gate. He’s bleeding. He says he has a message for the maid.”
TITLE: The Gold Watch Stopped At Midnight
