Chapter 3 - THE SECRET MY MOTHER BURIED
For several seconds, nobody spoke.
Even Lucia stopped crying.
I stared at my mother.
“What did you say?”
Elena’s hand slipped from my wrist.
Her eyes closed.
“Mom?”
I shook her shoulder.
“Mom!”
Santos grabbed my arm.
“Isabella, move.”
Paramedics rushed past me.
One pressed gauze against Elena’s shoulder while another checked her pulse.
“She’s alive.”
I stood frozen as they lifted my mother onto a stretcher.
Twenty-eight years ago.
They tried to kill you too.
I was twenty-eight years old.
The realization hit so hard I had to grip the end of a pew.
Adrian had reached the same conclusion.
His expression was unreadable.
“Your age.”
I looked at him.
“Don’t.”
“Isabella—”
“I said don’t.”
Lucia wrapped her arms around herself.
“I don’t understand.”
Neither did I.
Santos ordered officers to search the church.
They found two shell casings, footprints near a side entrance, and an abandoned black van four blocks away.
No Karen.
No attackers.
No answers.
But beneath the pew where Lucia had hidden, police found a small canvas bag.
Inside were three burner phones, several thousand dollars, a passport under my mother’s alias, and a photograph.
Santos showed it to me at the hospital.
The picture was old.
The corners had faded yellow.
A younger Elena stood beside a swimming pool holding a newborn wrapped in a white blanket.
Me.
Behind her stood a man in an expensive summer suit.
I knew that face.
Anyone who had lived in Chicago during the nineties knew it.
Enzo Valente.
Adrian’s father.
I looked at Adrian.
He stared at the photograph.
“That was taken at my family’s old Lake Geneva house.”
“How do you know?”
“The pool tiles.”
My pulse hammered.
“What was my mother doing there?”
“I don’t know.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“I was seventeen when you were born.”
I studied his face.
The math made sense.
Barely.
Adrian looked almost offended by the accusation I hadn’t said aloud.
“I’m not your father.”
“That wasn’t what I was thinking.”
“It was what everyone else in this hallway was thinking.”
Santos actually looked away.
Despite everything, a hysterical laugh almost escaped me.
It died immediately.
The doctor came through the emergency-room doors.
“Elena Alvarez?”
“Yes,” Lucia and I said together.
“She’s stable.”
My lungs released.
“The bullet passed through the upper shoulder. No major arteries were damaged.”
“Can we see her?”
“Briefly.”
Elena looked impossibly small in the hospital bed.
I remembered her differently.
Strong.
Always moving.
Always talking.
The woman in front of me seemed older than the years that had passed.
Lucia approached first.
Elena’s eyes filled.
“My baby.”
Lucia stopped.
“Don’t call me that.”
The pain on my mother’s face was immediate.
Good, I thought.
Then I hated myself for thinking it.
Lucia sat anyway.
“Why did you leave us?”
Elena looked at me.
“I thought I was saving you.”
“From who?” I asked.
She swallowed.
“The Valentes.”
Adrian stood near the door.
His body hardened.
“My family?”
“Not all of them.”
“Start at the beginning.”
Elena almost smiled.
“You sound like your father.”
Adrian didn’t react.
“My father trusted you?”
“No. Your mother did.”
That surprised him.
“Sofia?”
“No. Your mother. Caterina.”
Adrian’s face changed.
I knew very little about Caterina Valente.
She had died when Adrian was in his twenties.
Elena shifted painfully.
“I was nineteen when I started working for the Valente family. Not as a maid. I was training to become a nurse. Caterina hired me privately because she was ill.”
“With what?” I asked.
“Cancer.”
Adrian looked toward the window.
“She hid it.”
“Yes.”
“She died in a boating accident.”
“No,” Elena said quietly. “That’s what your father told the world.”
Adrian turned.
“What are you saying?”
“She died from cancer six months before the date on her public death record.”
The room became still.
“Why?”
“Because Enzo believed weakness invited attacks. Only a handful of people knew she was sick.”
“And you were one?”
“Yes.”
“What does that have to do with Isabella?”
Elena looked at me.
“Years later, I went back to work for Enzo.”
“Why?”
“I needed money. Your father was gone. Lucia had been born with heart problems.”
I frowned.
“Our father died when I was ten.”
Elena closed her eyes.
“The man you knew as your father died when you were ten.”
I felt cold.
“What does that mean?”
Lucia whispered, “Mom…”
Elena looked directly at me.
“Mateo Alvarez loved you. He raised you. He was your father in every way that matters.”
My knees weakened.
“But biologically?”
She didn’t answer quickly enough.
I stepped backward.
“No.”
“Isabella.”
“No.”
Adrian moved away from the wall.
“Who was her biological father?”
Elena’s eyes shifted toward him.
“His name was Daniel Moretti.”
Adrian’s face drained of color.
For the first time since I met him, Adrian Valente looked genuinely shocked.
“Dante’s uncle?”
“Yes.”
I turned toward him.
“Who is Daniel Moretti?”
“Dead,” Adrian said.
“When?”
“Twenty-seven years ago.”
One year after I was born.
Elena started crying.
“Daniel wasn’t like the others. He wanted out.”
“Out of what?”
“The organization.”
I stared at her.
“My biological father was mafia?”
“No.”
Adrian answered.
“Daniel Moretti was an accountant.”
Elena gave a bitter smile.
“For a criminal empire.”
Adrian ignored that.
“He handled financial records for my father.”
“And he discovered things,” Elena said. “Payments. Judges. Police. Politicians. People who disappeared.”
Santos stepped closer.
“What happened to him?”
“He planned to cooperate with federal investigators.”
My stomach twisted.
“And they killed him.”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
Elena looked terrified.
“I never knew exactly.”
“Then why did they come after me?”
“Daniel hid evidence before he died.”
“What kind of evidence?”
“A ledger.”
Santos inhaled sharply.
Elena continued.
“He told someone that if anything happened to him, the information would pass to his child.”
Adrian swore under his breath.
“But I was a baby.”
“They didn’t know that.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“I don’t know.”
“Stop saying that!”
My voice cracked through the room.
“You vanished for thirteen years. You let us believe you were dead. You met the woman who accused me of killing a baby, and now you’re telling me some mafia accountant I never met was my real father.”
I leaned over the bed.
“You know more than you’re saying.”
Elena cried silently.
“Yes.”
“Then tell me.”
She looked at Lucia.
“Not with her here.”
Lucia stood.
“No.”
“Sweetheart—”
“No. Isabella raised me. Not you. You don’t get to decide what I can handle.”
Elena closed her eyes.
Then she surrendered.
“Daniel gave me a key before he died.”
“To what?”
“I never found out.”
“Where is it?”
“I put it somewhere nobody would search.”
My pulse quickened.
“Where?”
She looked at me.
“Inside the stuffed rabbit you slept with as a child.”
I stared.
“Mr. Buttons?”
Lucia gave me an incredulous look.
“You named a rabbit Mr. Buttons?”
“I was four.”
Elena almost smiled.
“Do you still have him?”
I did.
He was in a box in the closet of our apartment.
I had kept only a few things from childhood.
Mr. Buttons was one of them.
Adrian immediately called his security team.
“No,” Santos snapped.
He looked at her.
“That apartment may already be compromised.”
“And your people are not entering a potential crime scene.”
“My daughter was drugged by someone who disabled my security system.”
Santos stepped closer.
“Exactly why I don’t trust your security system.”
Adrian’s expression hardened.
I interrupted.
“We all go.”
Both turned toward me.
“It’s my apartment.”
Santos sighed.
Thirty minutes later, we stood outside the building where Lucia and I had lived for six years.
The front door was open.
I knew immediately something was wrong.
Our landlord never left it open.
We climbed the stairs.
Apartment 3C.
The lock had been broken.
My stomach dropped.
“Stay behind me,” Santos said.
She entered first.
The living room had been destroyed.
Couch cushions slashed.
Drawers dumped.
Cabinets opened.
Photographs smashed.
Lucia whispered behind me.
“Oh my God.”
I ran toward the bedroom.
The closet door hung crooked.
The storage boxes had been thrown onto the floor.
I dropped to my knees.
“No.”
“What?” Adrian asked.
“The rabbit.”
Gone.
Mr. Buttons was gone.
Whoever had searched the apartment knew exactly what they wanted.
Santos walked through the rooms.
“They didn’t take the television. Laptop’s still here.”
“They wanted the key,” I said.
Adrian crouched beside the broken box.
“Maybe they didn’t find it.”
“The rabbit is missing.”
He picked up a torn piece of fabric.
A stuffed ear.
My heart jumped.
We searched.
Under the bed lay the remains of Mr. Buttons.
Someone had cut him open.
Cotton covered the carpet.
I grabbed the body.
Nothing.
Then I remembered something.
When I was eight, one of the rabbit’s plastic eyes had fallen out.
Mom had sewn a black button over the hole.
I touched it.
Hard.
Too hard.
“Wait.”
I ripped the stitching.
A tiny brass key fell into my palm.
Lucia gasped.
Adrian stared.
Santos took out an evidence bag.
Before she could reach for the key, the apartment lights died.
Adrian reacted first.
“Down!”
Glass exploded behind me.
A bullet struck the wall.
Lucia screamed.
Adrian pulled both of us behind the bed as Santos fired toward the window.
More glass shattered.
Then silence.
Police flooded the building.
The shooter was gone.
But something had been left on the fire escape.
A white envelope.
Inside was a photograph of Emma sleeping in her hospital crib.
Taken less than an hour earlier.
On the back, someone had written:
THE KEY FOR THE BABY.
Adrian read it once.
Then again.
His face became terrifyingly calm.
“They want to trade.”
Santos shook her head.
“They don’t have Emma.”
Adrian called the hospital.
Nobody answered.
He called his guard captain.
No answer.
A third number.
Nothing.
His face changed.
“Drive.”
We reached Emma’s floor in nine minutes.
Two guards were unconscious near the service elevator.
The nurse’s station was empty.
Adrian ran into Emma’s room.
The crib was there.
The monitors were there.
The blanket was there.
Emma was not.
On the pillow rested another note.
This one contained only an address.
And beneath it:
MIDNIGHT. BRING ISABELLA AND THE KEY.
Adrian crushed the paper in his fist.
I stared at the empty crib.
Then at him.
“I’m going.”
“No.”
“They specifically asked for me.”
“That’s exactly why you’re not going.”
“That baby is alive because of me.”
“And I intend to keep both of you alive.”
I stepped closer.
“Then stop treating me like someone you can order around.”
His eyes met mine.
Something shifted between us.
Not trust.
Not yet.
But recognition.
He finally nodded.
“We do it together.”
From the hallway, Dante Moretti approached.
He looked exhausted.
“Boss, what happened?”
Adrian held up the ransom note.
Dante read it.
His face went pale.
Then his eyes dropped to the small evidence bag in Santos’s hand.
To the brass key.
For half a second, something crossed his face.
It disappeared quickly.
But I saw it.
Recognition.
I looked at him.
“Dante.”
He met my eyes.
“What?”
“You’ve seen that key before.”
Silence.
May you like
Adrian slowly turned toward his right-hand man.
And Dante Moretti realized too late that I had noticed.
