Chapter 3 - The Cold Trail and the Poison in Capri
The rain fell over Lake Shore Drive like a curtain of liquid lead.
Inside the three-story penthouse overlooking the black waters of Lake Michigan, the air felt like a tomb. Damian strode through the double mahogany doors, his heavy dress shoes leaving muddy tracks across the white Calacatta marble he had imported from Italy because Claire had once remarked that she liked the soft gray veins running through the stone.
Now, that stone was covered in suitcases.
Four monogrammed Louis Vuitton trunks sat in the center of the foyer. Alessia was curled on the velvet sofa in the grand salon, wrapped in a cashmere blanket, sipping tea from Claire’s favorite hand-painted porcelain cup.
When she heard his heavy footsteps, she stood up, putting on an expression of soft, practiced sympathy. She wore a silk slip dress, her blonde hair artfully tousled, her eyes wide with what she clearly hoped looked like grief.
“Damian,” she whispered, gliding toward him with her arms outstretched. “Oh, God, I heard what happened at the hospital. I’m so sorry. The doctors… they said the baby was just too weak. It’s a tragedy, but you have to know it wasn't your fault—”
Before her manicured hands could touch his chest, Damian’s left hand caught her by the throat.
He didn't squeeze hard enough to crush her windpipe, but he hoisted her upward until her bare toes barely brushed the floor. Alessia’s porcelain cup slipped from her fingers, shattering against the marble, hot Earl Grey tea splattering across the pristine floor.
“D-Damian…” she choked out, her blue eyes bulging with terror.
“My son,” Damian said, his voice terrifyingly calm, “fought for twelve hours and six minutes. Do you know what you were doing during the eighth hour, Alessia?”
“Damian, please—”
“You were screaming at my private pilot because the catered strawberries on the Gulfstream weren't organic.”
Damian’s grip tightened by a fraction of an inch. His jaw ticked with barely restrained violence. “And at the tenth hour, when his oxygen levels plummeted to forty percent, where were we?”
Tears of pure horror spilled down Alessia’s cheeks. She clawed at his wrist, but his arm was an iron beam.
“You told me your passport was missing from your suite,” Damian continued, his dark eyes locking onto hers like an executioner’s. “You made my guards tear apart the entire villa for forty-five minutes. And where was it? In your purse. It was in your designer bag the entire time.”
Alessia gasped for air. “It was… an accident… I panicked…”
“It wasn't an accident,” a new voice echoed from the archway.
Marco stepped into the salon, holding an iPad and a thin manila folder. He didn’t look at Alessia with pity; he looked at her with the cold detachment reserved for a traitor awaiting the firing squad.
“Boss,” Marco said, tapping the tablet. “We ran the digital logs from the Capri villa’s local fiber line. At 1:12 A.M. Chicago time—five minutes after Mrs. Moretti’s water broke—an incoming text hit Miss Alessia’s private burner phone.”
Damian didn't release her. He turned his head slightly. “From whom?”
“From Vincenzo Rossi’s camp,” Marco answered.
The name hung in the air like a lethal gas. Vincenzo Rossi was the head of the North Side syndicate, Damian’s bitterest rival—a man who had spent three years trying to dismantle the Moretti supply lines.
Marco read directly from the screen: *‘The wife is in labor early. Keep Damian on the island for four hours, and the five-million-dollar offshore account in the Caymans clears by morning. Don't let him get on that plane.’*
The room went dead silent.
The only sound was the howling wind outside rattling the ten-foot glass windows overlooking the stormy lake.
Alessia’s face turned from pale to paper-white. The oxygen left her entirely. She stopped clawing at Damian’s hand and went limp, paralyzed by the realization that her game had been completely uncovered.
Damian stared at her.
He didn't yell. He didn't smash the furniture.
The silence that rolled off him was worse than an explosion. It was the absolute void of a man whose entire universe had just collapsed into a black hole.
“You took fifty thousand dollars a month from me,” Damian murmured, his voice softer than a summer breeze, yet dripping with venom. “I bought you a brownstone in Boston. I gave you diamonds. I indulged your vanity because Claire was quiet, and you made enough noise to distract me from the blood on my hands.”
He stepped closer, his face inches from hers.
“And you sold my child’s final breath for five million dollars.”
“Damian, no! They threatened my family!” she sobbed, terror completely stripping away her glamorous facade. “Rossi said he’d kill my sister! I had no choice! I didn't know the baby would die, I swear to God I didn't know!”
Damian dropped her.
Alessia collapsed onto the cold marble, coughing violently, gasping for air, clutching her bruised neck.
Damian didn’t look down at her. He turned to Marco.
“Take her to the cellar at the West Side rail yard,” Damian commanded. “Do not kill her. Do not touch her. Give her water and bread. When I dismantle every single member of the Rossi family bone by bone, I want her sitting in the front row to watch what her five million dollars bought.”
“Understood, boss,” Marco said. Two burly guards entered instantly, grabbing Alessia beneath her arms and dragging her across the floor as she screamed, begged, and clawed at the rugs.
When the heavy doors clicked shut behind them, Damian walked toward the master bedroom.
He pushed the door open.
The room smelled of Claire’s lavender lotion and clean cotton. But as he stepped inside, his chest seized.
The walk-in closet was open.
Every designer dress he had bought her—the emerald silk gowns, the Dior coats, the diamond necklaces worth half a million dollars—remained hanging neatly in rows. The velvet jewelry boxes on the vanity were untouched. The black American Express Centurion card he had given her with no limit sat right in the center of the glass dressing table.
She hadn't taken a single penny.
She hadn't taken a single dress.
The only things missing were her passport, a warm charcoal wool sweater her grandmother had knitted for her, a pair of worn leather boots, and the small wooden box containing their son’s ashes.
On the vanity, next to the black credit card, sat her wedding ring.
A five-carat flawless emerald-cut diamond set in platinum. It was the ring he had placed on her finger four years ago in the cathedral of St. Jude, when he had sworn before God and eight hundred guests that he would honor her, cherish her, and protect her with his life.
Beside the ring lay a small, folded piece of stationery.
Damian picked it up with hands that wouldn't stop shaking.
*Damian,*
*You always told me that in your world, loyalty is paid in blood, and absence is paid in death.*
*Today, our son paid your bill.*
*Do not look for me. Because if you find me, you will only find the ghost of the woman who died in Room 807.*
*And you cannot bring the dead back to life.*
May you like
Damian sank onto the edge of their empty bed, clutching the ring against his chest, and for the first time since he was a seven-year-old boy watching his father bleed out on the cobblestones of Little Italy, Damian Moretti began to weep.
***
