Chapter 5 - The Woman Who Refused to Die
The wind shrieked through the limestone canyon.
Luca’s boots were anchored deep in the snow.
His weapon remained pointed at Carlo Bellini’s heart, but his fingers were trembling.
Not from the freezing cold.
From pure, agonizing terror.
Twenty feet away, on the back of the open truck, the figure on the stretcher stirred.
A frail, pale hand weakly reached out from under the heavy wool blanket.
Her fingers hooked into the metal edge of the vehicle.
She was alive.
“Throw it down, Luca!” Carlo shouted again, his thumb hovering over the red toggle switch.
The LED light on the detonator blinked an ominous, steady green.
“You drop your gun, or I turn her into mist.”
“Carlo,” Luca’s voice cracked.
The boss of the Chicago syndicate was pleading.
“Take the offshore accounts. Take every dollar. Let her go.”
Carlo let out a wet, mocking laugh that ended in a cough.
“You think this is about the money now?”
Carlo’s eyes were wild, bloodshot, and full of venom.
“Your father humiliated me thirty years ago! He took the chair that was promised to me!”
He stepped back toward the driver’s seat.
“I took his wife. I took his daughter. And tonight, I bury his son.”
Behind the bulldozer, my heart hammered like a trapped bird.
My fingers were frozen stiff around the grip of the Glock Luca had given me.
I looked at Carlo’s stance.
His weight was entirely on his right leg, leaning heavily on that silver cane.
His left shoulder was turned away from me, shielded by the truck frame.
He didn't even know I was there.
He had forgotten the maid.
To him, I was nothing.
Just invisible staff.
Point and pull.
Luca’s words echoed in my ears.
Luca began lowering his pistol toward the snow.
“Don't do it, Luca!” a voice rasped from the stretcher.
The sound was faint, like dry leaves scraping over concrete.
The oxygen mask was pulled aside by trembling, arthritic fingers.
Lucia Moretti’s face was sunken, her cheekbones sharp under paper-thin skin.
Yet her dark eyes were identical to Luca’s.
Fierce.
Unbroken.
“Shoot him, Luca!” she coughed, her chest convulsing.
“Shoot the bastard!”
“Shut up, Lucia!” Carlo swung his walking cane toward the stretcher, clipping her shoulder.
She cried out in pain.
That single second of distraction was all I needed.
I stepped out from behind the rusted steel tread.
I raised the Glock with both hands, planting my boots firmly into the ice.
The front sight aligned with Carlo’s knee.
I didn't aim for his head.
I aimed for the leg holding him up.
Bang!
The recoil kicked hard against my wrists.
The bullet found its mark.
Carlo screamed in agony as his shattered kneecap buckled inward.
His silver cane flew into the snow.
The remote detonator slipped from his gloved hand, tumbling toward the icy ruts!
“Luca!” I screamed.
Luca moved faster than thought.
He lunged forward across the twenty feet of snow like a striking predator.
His boot slammed down onto the remote detonator just as Carlo’s hand clawed for it.
Crunch!
The plastic transmitter shattered into a dozen useless pieces under Luca’s heel.
Carlo looked up from the bloody snow, his face twisted in horror.
Luca didn't say a word.
He brought the heavy steel barrel of his Sig Sauer down across Carlo’s jaw.
Crack.
The older man slumped unconscious into the crimson slush.
The remaining two Bellini drivers threw their weapons out of the cab windows and raised their hands in terror.
“Out!” Luca roared.
The drivers scrambled out into the snow, dropping face down with their hands behind their heads.
Luca didn't care about them.
He turned toward the open bed of the Suburban.
He stopped two feet from the stretcher.
The lethal mob boss looked like a frightened child standing in front of a ghost.
Lucia looked at him.
Tears welled in her hollow, sunken eyes.
“Luca?” she whispered, her voice cracking.
“Mom,” Luca choked out.
He fell to his knees in the snow, his forehead resting against her frail, blanket-wrapped knees.
Great, shuddering sobs tore through his massive chest.
Twenty-two years of stone-cold fury melted away in the howling Illinois wind.
Lucia’s frail hand, scarred with IV needle marks, slowly lifted and rested against his dark hair.
“You grew up so handsome,” she wept softly.
“Just like your father.”
I stood ten feet away, lowering the smoking pistol, tears freezing on my own cheeks.
The storm seemed to pause around them.
Then Lucia’s eyes drifted past Luca’s shoulder.
She looked directly at me.
Her gaze shifted to the torn blue coat still clutched in Luca’s tactical belt.
Her lips parted.
“The coat,” she whispered.
Luca raised his head, wiping his tears with a rough sleeve.
“Emma found it, Mom. Emma found the bracelets.”
Lucia looked back at her son, her expression suddenly turning desperate and terrified.
“Luca... you have to find her.”
“Find who? Isabella is safe at the mansion!”
Lucia gripped Luca’s jacket with surprising strength.
“Not Isabella.”
Her breathing grew shallow, ragged.
“Elena.”
“Mom, Vanessa told us Elena was raised by Carlo—”
“No!” Lucia screamed, coughing violently.
“Elena was never with Carlo!”
Luca froze.
“What?”
Lucia’s eyes widened, staring straight into my face.
“Carlo couldn't keep her. She was stolen from St. Catherine's by a nurse twenty years ago!”
She raised a trembling finger, pointing it straight at my chest.
“The nurse's name was Sullivan!”
The wind stopped in my ears.
My blood turned completely to fire.
I looked down at the gun in my hands.
My mother.
Sarah Sullivan.
The alterations seamstress who always kept a locked metal tin under her bed.
The woman who raised me alone in a drafty apartment on the south side of Chicago.
Lucia looked at me with wild, weeping recognition.
“Her left collarbone,” Lucia cried out into the frozen night.
“Look beneath her collarbone!”
Luca slowly turned around in the snow.
May you like
His black eyes locked onto mine.
And for the first time in nine months, I felt completely exposed to the bone.
