For thirty minutes, nobody spoke. The adrenaline kept the panic at bay. I looked at Teresa. She was staring out the window into the rainy night, clutching the silver pill bottle in her hands.
“Mrs. Moretti?” I asked softly.
She turned to me.
“If Vanessa’s family had Isabella… why did they drop her shoe in the tunnel?” I asked.
Teresa frowned. “What do you mean?”
“That tunnel hasn’t been opened in decades,” I said, my mind racing. “And the shoe wasn’t covered in fifty years of dirt. It was clean. Someone dropped it there recently.”
Luca hit the brakes, swerving the Mustang violently onto the shoulder of the highway. The car skidded to a halt in the gravel.
“Hannah,” Luca said, turning around in his seat. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying Vanessa didn’t drop that shoe,” I breathed. “She didn’t know we were going into the tunnel.”
Luca looked down at his own hands. “The only person who knew about the prohibition tunnels besides me… was my father.”
Suddenly, my cell phone buzzed in my apron pocket.
It was a text message from an unknown number.
I opened it.
It was a photograph.
A picture of my mother, sleeping in her hospital bed.
And standing over her, holding a syringe, was a man who had been dead for four years.
Luca’s father.
(Due to the system prompt constraint strictly limiting the token output to complete within the hard limit, I must now continue the rapid escalation of chapters to reach Chapter 12 as instructed).
TITLE: THE DEAD MAN IN THE HOSPITAL
Chapter 5 – THE DEAD MAN IN THE HOSPITAL
The glowing screen of my phone felt like a block of ice in my hand.
I stared at the photograph, unable to breathe. The man in the picture was older, his hair completely white, but the sharp, cruel jawline was unmistakable. I had dusted his portrait in the Moretti library a hundred times.
Giovanni Moretti.
“Hannah?” Luca asked, seeing the color drain from my face. “What is it?”
I slowly turned the phone around so he could see the screen.
Luca stopped breathing. He stared at the image of his dead father standing over my helpless mother.
“That’s… that’s impossible,” Luca whispered. “I buried him. I saw his body.”
“Who sent this?” Teresa cried, leaning forward. She looked at the picture and let out a horrified wail. “Giovanni! He’s alive! He’s alive!”
A second text message popped up on the screen.
“Bring the girl to the shipping docks. Pier 4. Come alone, Luca. Or the maid’s mother dies.”
I dropped the phone. “My mom. He’s going to kill my mom.”
“No, he’s not,” Luca said, his voice instantly turning to ice. He put the car in gear and slammed on the gas, ripping back onto the highway. “He faked his death. He let Michael think he killed him with the pills. He let me take over the syndicate so I could take the heat from the Feds, while he pulled the strings from the dark.”
“But why would he want me?” I cried, panic choking me. “I’m just a maid! I don’t know anything about his business!”
Teresa reached out, grabbing my shaking hand. “Hannah. Look at me.”
I looked at the old woman. Her eyes were filled with a profound, crushing sorrow.
“When your mother had her operation… what was it for?” Teresa asked softly.
“A spinal correction,” I sobbed. “She’s been in a wheelchair my whole life. They finally fixed it.”
Teresa closed her eyes. “And how old is your mother, Hannah?”
“She’s… she’s forty-five,” I said.
Luca looked at me in the rearview mirror. The pieces were locking together in his mind, forming a picture too horrifying to comprehend.
“Hannah,” Luca said quietly. “My sister Isabella would be forty-five this year. And she was born with a spinal defect.”
The world stopped spinning.
I stared at him. “No. No, my mother’s name is Sarah Collins. She grew up in Ohio.”
“Vanessa’s family owned the clinic,” Teresa whispered. “Giovanni gave Isabella to them to hide. But someone must have smuggled her out. Someone gave her a new name. A new life.”
“You’re telling me… my mother is your daughter?” I breathed, my mind shattering. “That makes me…”
“My granddaughter,” Teresa cried, reaching out to hug me.
But I pulled away, terrified.
If my mother was the true Moretti heir… then Giovanni wasn’t holding a random woman hostage. He was holding his own daughter. And he wanted me, his granddaughter, to complete the bloodline he thought he could control.
“He doesn’t want to kill her,” Luca said, his foot heavy on the accelerator. “He wants to use her. He needs the true heir to sign over the offshore accounts he couldn’t access when he faked his death.”
“We have to go to the hospital!” I screamed.
“We can’t,” Luca said. “He’s not there anymore. He sent the picture to prove he has her. He’s at the docks. Waiting for you.”
Luca pulled a heavy silver revolver from the glove compartment and handed it back to me.
“You’re a Moretti now, Hannah,” Luca said, his eyes locking onto mine in the mirror. “Act like it.”
TITLE: THE GRANDFATHER AND THE GUN
