🥣 The Bowl of Soup That Exposed the Mafia Boss’s Fiancée

Chapter 08 - The Man Vanessa Erased

Marco Bellini did not look like the heir to anything.

He looked like a man who had slept in clothes too many nights in a row and eaten only when someone remembered to hand him a plate. His coat was cheap, wet through, and torn at one shoulder. Blood darkened his shirt beneath the ribs.

Luca knelt beside him.

“Who moved my mother?”

Sister Agnes snapped, “Let him breathe, you impossible man.”

She pressed a towel against Marco’s side with a firmness that suggested she had patched up half the city and judged all of it. I found the first-aid kit because poor people learn where supplies are without being told. Gabriel called a doctor who, judging by the words he used, owed Luca either money or his life.

Marco opened his eyes again.

“Bellini’s men.”

“Your father?” Luca asked.

Marco’s laugh came out broken.

“He was never my father. Fathers don’t sell the proof you were born.”

I stood back, arms wrapped around myself, listening to strangers discuss birth, betrayal, and documents as if my father had not been crushed somewhere in the machinery between them.

Marco’s gaze found me.

“You’re Carter’s daughter.”

“Yes.”

“He tried to find me.”

The anger I had been saving for my father shifted shape. It did not disappear. It became more complicated, which is worse.

“He should have told me.”

“Yes,” Marco said. “People should do many things before fear teaches them not to.”

Luca’s eyes cut to him.

“Where is my mother?”

“A closed nursing home near Joliet. Bellini used it before.”

“Why take her there?”

Marco tried to sit up. Failed. Luca put one hand behind his shoulder and steadied him before either of them could think too much about what that meant.

“Because she has the original,” Marco said.

“The will?”

“Not just the will. A recording.”

Vanessa had told Luca his mother would tell him everything. I wondered if she had known everything herself.

“What recording?” I asked.

Marco looked at me.

“Salvatore Bellini admitting he arranged my adoption, paid the judge, and ordered James Carter removed when he started asking questions.”

The basement hummed around us.

Removed.

Such a clean word for ruined.

My father had spent four years trapped inside a body that no longer obeyed him because powerful men preferred their secrets comfortable.

I turned away before anyone saw my face.

Luca did.

Of course he did.

“Emma.”

“Don’t.”

“I was going to say your father is alive.”

I looked back.

“He is not the man he was.”

“No,” Luca said quietly. “But he is alive. That means Bellini failed once.”

I hated that it helped.

The doctor arrived through the back door in a raincoat over pajamas. He examined Marco with brisk irritation, declared the wound ugly but survivable, and gave Luca a look that dared him to ask questions before the bleeding stopped.

Luca asked anyway.

“Can he travel?”

“No.”

Marco said, “I can.”

Sister Agnes smacked the counter.

“You can bleed on my floor, apparently. That is all.”

For one brief second, Luca Moretti looked like a boy being scolded by a woman who remembered him before he became frightening.

Then Gabriel returned from the alley.

“Boss. We found the car that brought Marco here. Driver’s gone. Trunk was open.”

Luca stood.

“What was inside?”

Gabriel looked at me before answering.