Chapter 2 - The Echoes of Four Years Ago
I sat motionless in the leather armchair as the morning sun climbed higher, casting long, geometric blocks of gold across the marble.
My fingers gripped the letter so tightly the cream paper creaked under my knuckles.
He is yours.
Four years ago.
Four years ago, before Rosa Mendes ever walked into my estate as a quiet housemaid wearing simple cotton dresses, my life was in flames. The Moretti syndicate was engulfed in a war with the Castiglione family from Chicago. Gunfire echoed down dockyards, safe houses burned, and my wife, Isabella, was four months pregnant with our child.
I had moved Isabella to a fortified villa in the hills outside Genoa, guarded by twelve of my most trusted men. I believed she was safe. I believed my money, my iron grip, and my bloodline could protect her from the shadows that devoured other men’s families.
I was wrong.
A traitor inside my inner circle—a man named Viktor, who had served my father for thirty years—leaked the villa’s coordinates to the Castiglione assassins.
The attack came at midnight.
When I arrived at the burning villa three hours later, the roof had collapsed into the master bedroom. My soldiers lay dead in the rose garden. Isabella was gone, her body pulled from the rubble two days later by local firefighters. The medical examiner told me the smoke had taken her before the fire ever touched her skin. He told me the unborn baby had perished with her.
I spent six months hunting down every man involved. I wiped the Castiglione family off the map in three blood-soaked weeks. When the smoke cleared, I returned to my empty mansion on Long Island, a shell of a man who believed his entire bloodline had been extinguished in the hills of Genoa.
Two years later, Rosa Mendes applied for a housekeeping job at my estate. She brought an infant boy wrapped in a hand-knit blanket. She claimed he was her orphan nephew, whom she was raising after her sister passed away in childbirth. Her papers were clean. Her background was spotless. She worked quietly, kept her head down, and raised little Lucas in the staff quarters of the west wing.
And I had let them stay. I had watched the boy grow from a silent baby into a curious toddler, never once looking into his dark gray eyes—the exact gray eyes of the Moretti men.
I looked back down at the letter in my hand.
Mr. Moretti,
If you are reading this, my heart has finally failed me, as the doctors in Italy warned it would four years ago. I am sorry for deceiving you for two years under your own roof, but I was terrified.
I was a nurse at the private clinic in Genoa the night your wife was brought in by a stranger before the villa burned down. Isabella was alive when she reached us. She lived just long enough to deliver your son through an emergency operation.
Before she died, Isabella held my hand. She knew the Castiglione hitmen were checking every hospital in Genoa to make sure her child did not survive. She begged me to take her baby, hide him under my own name, and protect him until the war ended. She gave me her wedding ring and a letter for you.
I fled Italy the next day with baby Lucas. I moved to America, forged my papers, and waited. When I heard you had destroyed the Castiglione syndicate, I took a job in your house. I wanted to tell you every day, Mr. Moretti. But every time I saw your cold, distant face, I feared that bringing Lucas into your world of blood and guns would destroy the life his mother gave her soul to save.
May you like
Please forgive me. Lucas is innocent. He has your eyes, your stubborn heart, and his mother’s laugh. Love him as he deserves to be loved.
Rosa.
