Chapter 4 - The Hunt for the Truth
At 9:15 PM, my black Maybach pulled up to the curb outside the old brick warehouse on Commercial Wharf that housed the nerve center of Moretti Private Security.
Rain lashed against the windshield in violent sheets. Inside the building, the air smelled of stale espresso, gun oil, and high-end server racks.
Dante Alighieri—my head of personal operations, a former Navy intelligence officer who had kept me alive in three different countries—was waiting by the main tactical table when I pushed through the security doors.
"The news is already all over Twitter, boss," Dante said, tossing a tablet onto the glass desk. The headline on the Boston Herald website screamed in bold red font: MORETTI SHOCKS HIGH SOCIETY: BARRETT ALLIANCE SHATTERS ON DAIS. "Barrett's people are claiming you had an episode. Salvatore’s people are claiming you were drugged. Half the city thinks you lost your mind."
"I don't care what the city thinks," I stripped off my soaking wet suit jacket and threw it over the back of a leather chair. I unbuttoned my cuffs and rolled my sleeves to the elbows. "I need an address, Dante. And I need it before the clock strikes midnight."
Dante leaned his hands on the table, studying the grim, unyielding expression on my face. "An address for who?"
"Elena Vance."
Dante went completely still. He had worked for me for ten years; he was one of only three people alive who knew how close I had come to burning the city down when Elena vanished six years ago.
"Dominic... Elena is gone," Dante said cautiously, his voice lowering with genuine concern. "We searched for two years. Her bank accounts died. Her social security went dark. Salvatore confirmed—"
"Salvatore lied," I cut him off, slamming my palm down onto the glass table with a crack that echoed off the concrete walls. "I saw her tonight. An hour ago. At L’Auberge in Back Bay."
Dante’s eyes widened. "Are you certain?"
"She had four boys with her, Dante," I said, my voice dropping to a gravelly rasp that shook with raw emotion. "Four six-year-old boys. They have my face. They have my hands. They have my blood."
The silence in the room stretched for ten full seconds. Dante didn't ask another question. He turned to the massive multi-screen array on the wall and sat behind the primary terminal. His fingers flew across the mechanical keyboard like machine-gun fire.
"Traffic cameras around Back Bay between 6:30 and 7:30 PM," Dante muttered, pulling up satellite overlays and municipal feeds. "If she left L’Auberge in a hurry, she took public transit or a cab. You said she mentioned a train?"
"She told the kids they had to catch the eight o'clock train or wait two hours in the cold," I said, pacing behind his chair like a caged animal. "Run cab dispatches from the Boylston stand. Run facial recognition on the inbound platforms at South Station and North Station."
While Dante's algorithms crunched the transit data, I walked into the private vault room at the back of the facility.
Behind an oil painting of the Boston Harbor hung a biometric safe that had belonged to my father, Don Antonio Moretti. Before his death four years ago, my father had kept every ledger, every piece of blackmail, and every family settlement locked inside this steel box.
I pressed my thumb against the optical scanner. The heavy bolts clicked back with a heavy thud.
Inside lay three thick manila envelopes dated from six years ago.
I pulled the top file marked VANCE, E. and brought it into the light.
Six years ago, Salvatore had handed me a carbon-copy receipt showing a wire transfer of five hundred thousand dollars from the family treasury into an offshore account in Elena’s name, accompanied by a typed letter bearing what looked like her signature, stating she was terminating the relationship due to irreconcilable differences and the inherent danger of my lifestyle.
At the time, grief-stricken and half-blind with betrayal, I had accepted it.
Now, holding the document under the halogen desk lamp, I looked closer.
I turned the page over. Tucked beneath the bank receipt was a surveillance memo written on private letterhead from an agency my uncle used for off-the-books wet work.
Target intercepted at 144 Marlborough Street on October 14. Subject informed that contract on Dominic Moretti will be executed within 48 hours if she fails to vacate the state immediately. Subject refused financial settlement. Subject departed via Greyhound bus to Portland, Maine, zero assets claimed.
My blood ran ice cold.
She never took the money.
She had refused every single cent. Salvatore hadn't bought her off—he had threatened my life to force her out. He had told the woman carrying my unborn children that if she stayed in Boston, I would be murdered in the street. And she had run into the cold with nothing, sacrificing the only life she knew just to keep me breathing.
"Dominic!" Dante’s voice shouted from the main room.
I folded the memo, shoved it into my pocket, and marched out of the vault.
"I got her," Dante pointed at the center monitor.
The screen displayed a grainy, timestamped freeze-frame from an MBTA platform at Maverick Station in East Boston. Elena was there, clutching two boys by their jackets while the other two held onto her grocery bags.
"She didn't take an Amtrak or a commuter rail," Dante said, tracing the route. "She took the Blue Line into East Boston. A rental lease came up under the name 'Elena Mercer'—her mother's maiden name—registered three months ago to a four-unit walk-up at 414 Maverick Street. Apartment 2B."
I looked at the address. East Boston. A working-class neighborhood across the harbor, barely three miles from the penthouse where I slept on six-hundred-thread-count sheets. She had been living right under my nose, struggling to pay rent in a damp tenement, while I attended charity galas and signed corporate mergers.
"Get the car," I ordered, grabbing my heavy black wool overcoat.
"Dominic, wait," Dante warned, standing up. "Salvatore has eyes on the East Boston docks. If he realizes where you're going, if he figures out why you walked out on Sloane Barrett, he won't let those boys live. You know how the succession works. If you have legitimate heirs, Salvatore's sons get nothing."
May you like
I reached into the weapons cabinet behind the door, pulled out a custom matte-black Sig Sauer P226, checked the magazine with a sharp click, and holstered it beneath my left arm.
"Let him try," I said softly. "Drive the car."
