Chapter 4
Chapter 4
“They took him out across the fire escape,” Mia cried, collapsing against my chest as I caught her shaking shoulders. “Two men with suppressed pistols came through the balcony window. I fought them, Elena, but they were too strong for me.”
“Did they say where they were bringing him?” Dante demanded, his voice dropping into a register so dark it made the glass fixtures rattle. The cold authority radiating off him was sufficient to freeze the blood of any ordinary man.
“The docks,” Mia choked out, wiping tears from her swollen cheek with the back of her sleeve. “They said Salvatore Vance was waiting for the Moretti heir at the old naval warehouse near Calumet River before Dante could shut down the city.”
Dante pulled a radio transmitter from his coat, barking coded orders that mobilized hundreds of hidden operatives across the municipal grid. Within seconds, the entire underground machinery of Chicago snapped into a ruthless, synchronized hunting mode dedicated to our boy.
“You stay with Mia in an armored transport,” Dante told me, his gaze softening just enough to reveal his agony. “I swear on my soul, Elena, I will bring Leo back to you, or I will not return at all.”
“I’m coming with you,” I stated, grabbing the lapel of his tailored coat with unwavering conviction in my eyes. “He is my child, Dante. I have protected him for three years without you, and I will not sit in a car waiting.”
He stared down at my determined face, recognizing the stubborn steel that had made him fall in love with me nearly a decade ago. Without a word of protest, he reached inside his holster, handed me a compact firearm, and nodded once.
“Victoria, stay here with the extraction team,” Dante ordered sharply without looking back at his legal wife. “If you ever loved your sister or your late father, do not speak a single word of this to anyone outside this room.”
We descended to the underground parking garage where three black armored Suburbans were already idling, their engines emitting a low, predatory growl. Heavily armed men in tactical gear dipped their heads in grim deference as Dante approached the lead vehicle.
The drive toward the Calumet industrial basin was a blur of torrential rain, flashing red lights, and deafening silence inside the cabin. Dante held my free hand with a grip so tight his knuckles turned bone white against the dark leather seats.
“I never touched Victoria, Elena,” he confessed quietly into the dimness of the speeding SUV. “Not once. The ceremony was a public spectacle to divert Salvatore's gaze, but our private quarters were separated by three steel security doors.”
Tears welled in my eyes as I processed his words, feeling the icy wall around my heart begin to thaw beneath the grief. He had endured three years of public judgment and private isolation, believing he had successfully sent me into sanctuary.
“Why didn't you write to me in Switzerland?” I asked, my voice cracking beneath the hum of the roaring tires. “Why did you leave me to believe that everything we built together was just a disposable secret you discarded so easily?”
“Salvatore intercepted every letter my couriers carried,” Dante answered, his jaw clenching until the muscles jumped beneath the skin. “He replaced my messages with fabricated reports stating you had married an artisan in Geneva and wanted nothing to do with Chicago.”
The depth of Vance’s cruelty was staggering, an intricate cage built of lies designed to keep Dante isolated and vulnerable. If Leo had not pointed at his father in that terminal, we might have lived out our entire lives believing those poisonous falsehoods.
The convoy slowed to a crawl as we entered the desolate industrial graveyard lining the rain-slicked riverbank. Dilapidated brick structures loomed like silent sentinels against the stormy sky, their broken window panes rattling under the force of the autumn gale.
Dante raised his hand, signaling the trailing vehicles to extinguish their headlights and take tactical positions along the perimeter fences. He stepped out into the mud, his coat billowing in the wind, and reached back to pull me gently to his side.
“Thermal scopes confirm five hostiles on the ground floor and two on the elevated catwalk,” the lieutenant whispered through Dante’s earpiece. “The boy is being held in the central administrative office, unharmed but secured to a metal chair.”
The mere image of my tiny, innocent boy tied to a rusted chair ignited a white-hot fury within my maternal soul. I checked the safety on the pistol Dante had given me, refusing to allow fear to paralyze my limbs any longer.
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“We don't wait for negotiations,” Dante commanded his inner strike team in a lethal whisper that gave no quarter. “Salvatore wants to crown himself tonight over the ashes of my bloodline. Show him why the Morettis have ruled this soil for fifty years.”
—END OF Chapter 4,
