CHAPTER 8 — The Name Above Vittorio
Bianca agreed to meet in a church.
Not because she had become religious.
Because she believed no one would shoot her in a place filled with cameras, parishioners, and stained-glass windows.
The church was in Brooklyn, old and narrow, tucked between a bakery and a dry cleaner. Rain pressed against the colored windows, turning the light inside blue and gold.
Marcus waited outside with two members of the security team.
Lucian stayed in the car across the street.
I had insisted on that.
Bianca was my conversation.
My risk.
My choice.
She sat alone in the third pew from the front, wearing a black coat and dark sunglasses. She looked thinner than I remembered. Her hair was pulled back carelessly, and there were shadows beneath her eyes.
She did not stand when I approached.
“You came,” she said.
“You said Vittorio was not the head.”
Bianca looked toward the altar.
“He never was.”
“Then who is?”
She swallowed.
“My father.”
I stared at her.
“Your father died.”
“That is what everyone believes.”
“Lucian’s father?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
Bianca’s eyes filled with tears.
“You think Vittorio staged his death? My father invented the plan.”
The church seemed colder.
Lucian’s father, Antonio Moretti, had been dead for nearly a decade. He was the man people blamed for creating the Moretti syndicate’s most brutal era. He was the man Lucian feared and worshipped in equal measure. He was the man Bianca had described as cruel, distant, and impossible to please.
“He is alive?” I asked.
Bianca nodded.
“He has been alive the entire time.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re lying.”
“I swear I don’t know.”
“Then why come here?”
“Because he knows about Nico.”
My heart began to pound.
Bianca lowered her voice.
“He has been watching Lucian for years. He knows Lucian cooperated with investigators. He knows Vittorio was arrested. And he believes Lucian’s weakness is the reason the family fell.”
“Nico is not his weakness.”
“No,” Bianca said. “Nico is his bloodline.”
The words made me sick.
To them, children were never children.
They were heirs.
Assets.
Leverage.
Future soldiers in a war they never chose.
“I will not let him near my son,” I said.
Bianca’s expression crumpled.
“You cannot fight him the way you fought Lucian.”
“Watch me.”
“You don’t know him.”
“No,” I said. “But I know men like him. They confuse fear with loyalty. They think family means ownership. They believe everyone can be bought, threatened, or broken.”
Bianca looked at me with a mixture of terror and something else.
Hope.
“What do you want from me?” I asked.
“I want you to get Nico out of the country.”
“No.”
“Serena—”
“I will not spend my son’s childhood running from ghosts.”
“You will if you understand what Antonio does to people who betray him.”
“I understand enough.”
“No, you don’t.” Bianca’s voice cracked. “He took my son.”
The air left my lungs.
“You told me Matteo was taken by Vittorio.”
“I lied.”
“Why?”
“Because saying my father took him was worse.”
I sat beside her.
For the first time, Bianca did not look like Lucian’s polished, calculating sister.
She looked like a mother who had been broken long before I met her.
“I was nineteen,” she whispered. “I got pregnant. My father said the baby made me vulnerable. He said enemies could use him against us.”
“What happened?”
“He gave Matteo away.”
“To who?”
“I don’t know. He never told me.”
“Did Lucian know?”
Bianca’s eyes closed.
“He was sixteen. He saw everything.”
That explained more than I wanted it to.
Lucian had not been born cruel.
He had been raised in a house where love was punished and fear was taught as survival.
It did not excuse him.
But it revealed the machinery that made him.
Bianca reached into her bag and removed a small key.
“This opens a storage unit in Queens,” she said. “There are documents inside. Names. Account numbers. Evidence against my father.”
“Why haven’t you given this to the authorities?”
“Because I did not know who to trust.”
“And you trust me?”
“No,” she said honestly. “But I trust that you will protect Nico.”
I took the key.
“What do you want in return?”
Bianca looked down at her hands.
“If you find Matteo…”
She could not finish.
I understood anyway.
“I will find him,” I said.
Outside the church, Lucian was waiting beside the car.
He saw the key in my hand and knew Bianca had told me something important.
“What did she say?” he asked.
I looked at him.
“Your father is alive.”
Lucian went still.
The color drained from his face.
For the first time since I had known him, I saw him look like a frightened boy.
“No,” he whispered.
“She says he took Matteo.”
Lucian leaned against the car, one hand covering his mouth.
I watched him struggle to breathe.
Part of me wanted to comfort him.
The old part of me.
The wife who had always rushed to soothe his pain, even when he had caused mine.
But I did not move.
Instead, I said, “We are going to the storage unit.”
Lucian looked at me.
“And after that?”
“After that, we stop running from your family’s secrets.”
That night, in a Queens storage facility, we opened the metal door.
Inside were boxes.
Dozens of them.
Bank records.
Photographs.
Old passports.
Letters.
And one file marked with a name I had never seen before.
M. Moretti — Placement Records.
Bianca’s son.
Matteo.
But beneath that folder was another file.
One with Nico’s name.
And inside it was a photograph taken two days earlier.
May you like
Someone had been inside my apartment.
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