Chapter 3 - The Ghost of St. Jude's Private Clinic
Elena took a deep, shuddering breath, wiping the tears from her cheeks with the hem of her apron.
“Three years ago,” Elena began, her voice trembling, “I wasn't a domestic maid. I was a senior neonatal intensive care nurse at St. Jude’s Hospital under my real name—Elena Vance.”
She looked at Leo, whose eyelids were beginning to droop with sleepiness as he rested against my thigh.
“Two days before the explosion,” Elena continued, “your late wife, Isabella, had given birth to Mateo prematurely. He was placed in Incubator 4 under my direct medical care. Late on a Thursday night, a man wearing a surgical mask and high-ranking administrative credentials entered the ward. It was Dr. Julian Rossi—the cousin of Victor Rossi.”
The name Victor Rossi made my knuckles turn white against the sofa cushions.
The Rossi syndicate was the rival faction that had been attempting to muscle in on our container shipping terminals in Port Newark for over a decade.
“Julian Rossi ordered me to inject a paralytic neurotoxin into Mateo’s IV line,” Elena whispered, her hazel eyes wide with remembered horror. “He told me that if I refused, his men would execute my younger brother, who was attending college in Boston. He said they were going to detonate an incendiary device in the oxygen storage room to cover the theft of the Moretti heir.”
“Why would Victor Rossi steal my son?” I snarled, a wave of lethal fury washing over me.
“To keep him as a permanent collateral hostage,” Elena explained, her voice cracking. “Victor wanted to raise your son in a secure compound in Montreal under the Rossi name, wait until he was eighteen, and use him to legally claim the hereditary trusts and shipping assets of the Moretti family without ever firing a bullet at you.”
Elena reached out, gently caressing Leo’s dark curls.
“I couldn't do it, Mr. Moretti. I couldn't inject that poison into an innocent newborn baby. So twenty minutes before the explosion, I swapped Mateo with a deceased infant from the morgue whose parents had abandoned the remains the night before. I placed Mateo inside an insulated medical courier cooler, carried him out through the basement laundry chute, and fled the hospital just as the third floor went up in flames.”
I stared at her, my heart aching with a mixture of overwhelming gratitude and sickening rage.
“You saved his life,” I breathed.
“I tried to go to the police,” Elena wept. “But when I saw the news the next morning, the police chief was standing beside Victor Rossi at a charity press conference. The entire metropolitan precinct was compromised. I knew that if Victor discovered Mateo was alive, his hitmen would slaughter us both.”
“So you hid him?”
“For six months, I lived in hiding in rural Maine under a false identity,” Elena said. “But as Mateo grew, I realized I couldn't protect him forever. Victor’s mercenaries were actively hunting the missing nurse from St. Jude’s. The only place on earth where Victor Rossi’s assassins would never dare to look for the missing Moretti heir… was inside the personal fortress of Dante Moretti.”
Elena looked up at me, tears streaming down her face, her hands trembling in front of her.
“I forged my domestic references. I applied for the maid position. I brought your son back to his father’s house, watching you from the shadows every day, waiting for the right moment to tell you… but I was terrified that your thirst for revenge would put a target on Mateo’s back before you could destroy the Rossi syndicate.”
The heavy mahogany doors clicked open, and Dominic led Dr. Ronald Bell into the room.
The geneticist was out of breath, carrying a heavy silver Pelican case containing a mobile DNA diagnostic analyzer.
May you like
I slowly lifted Mateo into my arms, stood up, and looked at Ronald with cold, absolute authority.
“Swab my mouth, Ronald,” I commanded. “And swab this boy. I want the results before the hour is out.”
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