Chapter 8 - The Confrontation in the Falling Snow
"Hold your fire!" Victor screamed over his shoulder to his security team, his voice cracking. "Nobody raise a weapon! Stand down! Stand down!"
Marco and his men immediately lowered their rifles, forming a wide, defensive perimeter around the farmhouse, facing outward toward the road.
Victor took two slow steps toward the porch, his hands held high in the air, open and empty. His custom pistol lay discarded in the snow behind him.
"Stay right there, mister!" Caleb yelled, his finger resting firmly on the front trigger of the shotgun. "I don't care how many fancy trucks you got. You take one more step toward this porch, and I’ll put a hole in you the size of a dinner plate."
Victor stopped at the bottom of the wooden porch steps.
He didn't look at Caleb. He didn't look at the twin barrels pointed at his heart. He looked straight past the old farmer, straight into the wide, haunted gray eyes of his wife.
Nora looked so small.
She was wearing an oversized flannel shirt that belonged to Caleb, her hair unwashed, her face pale, her lips chapped and raw. But her arms were wrapped around Leo and Mia with an intensity that could have moved mountains.
"Nora," Victor choked out, the word barely surviving the howling wind.
Nora stepped out from behind the screen door, standing beside Caleb. Her voice trembled, but her eyes were made of cold, unyielding iron.
"Tell your men to leave, Victor," Nora said, her voice cutting through the storm. "Take your trucks, take your money, and go back to Sylvia."
Hearing that name spoken aloud in the freezing countryside hit Victor harder than any bullet ever could. He dropped his hands to his sides, his shoulders slumping in total, absolute defeat.
"The men who were shooting... they were Moretti's men," Victor said, his voice shaking with raw emotion. "They tracked us. I had to secure the perimeter. Nora... are Leo and Mia okay? Does Leo have his medicine? Is he breathing?"
Nora let out a bitter, humorless laugh that sounded like cracking ice.
"Now you care if he’s breathing?" Nora cried, hot tears spilling over her eyelashes and freezing on her cheeks. "Now you care? Where were you on Tuesday when his oxygen saturation dropped to eighty-eight percent and I spent five hours begging the pediatric specialist to adjust his dosage? You were at the Four Seasons buying vintage champagne for another woman! You smelled like cherry blossoms while our son was turning blue in my arms!"
Every word was a nail driven directly into Victor’s soul. He took a shuddering breath, the freezing air burning his lungs, but the pain inside his chest was infinitely worse.
"You're right," Victor whispered, loud enough for her to hear. "You are completely right, Nora. I was a coward. I was weak. I was a monster."
"You don't get to come here and play the remorseful father!" Nora shouted, her voice breaking into a sob. "You don't get to take them from me! I will die before I let you take my babies to a nanny while you live your disgusting double life! I have fifty thousand dollars in cash, I have their medical charts, and I will disappear where you will never find us!"
Victor slowly sank to his knees in the two-foot-deep snow at the base of the porch steps.
Caleb blinked in shock, slowly lowering the shotgun an inch.
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Victor Rinaldi—the man who controlled a multi-billion-dollar empire, the man before whom Chicago’s most powerful figures knelt—knelt in the freezing slush, his head bowed, his hands resting palms-up in the snow.
"I didn't come to take them from you, Nora," Victor wept, the tears freezing on his stubbled cheeks. "I came to make sure you were alive. If you want to leave me... leave me. Take everything. Take the penthouse, take the bank accounts, take the trust funds, take every single dollar I have ever earned. But please... let the pediatric doctors in that second truck examine Leo. His lungs can't survive this cold. Punish me. Destroy me. But let the doctors save our son."
