Lorenzo’s Child
Chapter 03 - Lorenzo’s Child
Dante had buried Lorenzo Romano on a gray morning in March with a bullet still lodged too close to his spine for the mortician to remove.
At least, that was what the doctors had told him.
The coffin had been closed.
Their mother had worn black lace and said nothing through the service. Their father, already half-devoured by illness, had gripped Dante’s wrist and whispered that the family was now his burden.
Dante had accepted the burden because no one else was left to carry it.
Now, five years later, a hidden memory card showed Lorenzo alive in a hunting lodge with his arm around Clara Hayes.
And Lily, the child who had stood crying outside Dante’s door, had called him Daddy.
Dante watched the photograph without blinking.
Marco stood beside him, silent for once.
Mrs. Vale had been taken to a holding room near the old wine cellar with two guards outside the door. Not a cell, technically. The Romano family preferred polite names for ugly rooms.
Lily sat beside Clara in the infirmary, where her mother still had not opened her eyes.
Dante stood in his office with the laptop on his desk and replayed the files one by one.
There were only six.
Three photographs.
Two short video clips.
One audio recording.
The first photograph showed Lorenzo younger than Dante remembered him, wearing a brown coat and holding Lily as a newborn. Clara sat on a sofa nearby, looking exhausted, frightened, and happy in the way new mothers sometimes looked when they had not slept in days.
The second photograph showed Lorenzo with a bruised cheek, handing something to Clara.
The third showed a black sedan outside the lodge. Its license plate belonged to a company Dante had burned out of Boston four years earlier.
The first video was eleven seconds long.
Lorenzo’s voice filled the office.
“If Dante sees this, it means I failed to get them out.”
Marco inhaled sharply.
Dante did not move.
On the screen, Lorenzo looked thinner than he had before his death. Older, too. Fear had a way of aging a man without touching his hair.
“Clara knows part of it,” Lorenzo said. “Not everything. I did that on purpose. Don’t punish her for my secrets. The child is mine. Her name is Lily. She has no part in this.”
The recording crackled.
Lorenzo looked off camera, then back.
“Someone inside the family is selling our routes to the Bellamys. I thought it was Enzo, but it goes higher. Father knew before he died. He made me disappear to find proof.”
Dante’s mouth went dry.
Their father had known Lorenzo was alive.
Their father had lied at the funeral.
The video ended there.
The second video was damaged, only fragments of sound and image.
A woman’s voice: “She can’t stay hidden forever.”
Lorenzo: “If my brother knows she exists, he’ll protect her.”
The woman laughed.
“You always did overestimate Dante’s heart.”
The audio recording was worse.
No image.
Just voices.
Lorenzo, a man Dante did not recognize, and one soft sound in the background that might have been a baby crying.
“I’ll give you the ledger,” Lorenzo said, “after Clara and Lily are safe.”
“You aren’t making terms.”
“You kill me, you lose the key.”
A pause.
Then Lorenzo said, “Tell Dante the wolf was never at his door. It was in his house.”
The recording ended with a gunshot.
Dante shut the laptop.
Marco looked as though he wanted to speak and had decided living was preferable.
Dante turned toward the window. Morning had come, pale and weak over the gardens.
“Find Enzo,” he said.
Marco’s expression tightened. “Your uncle has been in Naples for two months.”
“No. He wants us to believe he has been in Naples for two months.”
“I’ll verify.”
“Don’t verify. Find him.”
Marco nodded.
Dante picked up the pendant with red enamel nails. “And find out who owns this symbol.”
“I know who owns it.”
Dante looked back.
Marco’s jaw was rigid. “The Red Hand. A broker network. They don’t move drugs or guns themselves. They move secrets. Blackmail. Children sometimes. Witnesses. Anyone with value.”
The temperature of the room seemed to change.
“Children,” Dante repeated.
Marco looked toward the infirmary wing. “If Lily is Lorenzo’s daughter and the Red Hand knows…”
“They will come for her.”
“They already came for Clara.”
Dante moved past him toward the door.
Clara woke forty minutes later.
Dante was standing at the foot of the infirmary bed when her eyes opened. For a moment she saw only the ceiling. Then she turned her head, saw Lily asleep in a chair beside the bed, and tried to sit up.
“No,” Dante said. “Stay still.”
Panic sharpened her face.
“Lily?”
“She’s safe.”
Clara’s gaze swung to him. Fear filled her so fast it looked like pain.
“You know.”
“I know she is Lorenzo’s daughter.”
The monitor beside her bed beeped faster.
Clara closed her eyes.
“I never meant to bring this to your house.”
“You brought my brother’s child under my roof and hid her in a room smaller than my bathroom.”
Her eyes opened, wet and furious. “Because I was told that if anyone knew, she would disappear before morning.”
“By whom?”
She swallowed.
“Lorenzo.”
Dante went still.
“He said you had enemies inside your own walls. He said if anything happened to him, I was not to come to you unless there was no other choice.”
“You decided collapsing from poison was that point?”
“I didn’t know I’d been poisoned.”
“You were threatened last night.”
Clara looked toward Lily.
Dante lowered his voice. “Not in front of her.”
They moved Lily to the adjoining room with Mrs. Bell and cartoons on a tablet. Clara watched the door until it closed, then turned back to Dante.
“You need to let us leave.”
“No.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I am beginning to hate that sentence.”
“The Red Hand has Lorenzo’s ledger. Or they think I have it. I don’t. I never did.”
Dante leaned closer. “Then why hide the memory card?”
“Because Lorenzo gave it to Lily’s bear before he vanished. He said if the wrong person found it, they would know she existed. I kept moving. Cheap rooms. Church shelters. Cleaning jobs. Then Mrs. Vale found me.”
Dante’s eyes sharpened. “Vale brought you here?”
“She said your mother had once helped women like me. She said this house was the safest place in Boston.”
“And you believed her?”
Clara gave a broken laugh. “I had twelve dollars, a feverish toddler, and men following us from Providence. Belief wasn’t a luxury I could afford.”
Dante looked at her pale face, the exhaustion beneath her eyes, the pride that had survived poverty and terror but barely.
“Who is the bad man Lily mentioned?”
Clara’s lips parted.
Before she could answer, the lights went out.
Emergency power clicked on at once, bathing the infirmary in red.
Marco’s voice exploded through Dante’s earpiece.
“Boss, east gate breach. Three vehicles. They used our access codes.”
Dante looked at Clara.
May you like
She whispered the name she had been afraid to say.
“Enzo.”
