Chapter 4 - The Traitor at the Family Table
The person who had betrayed Lorenzo was not Dante.
It was not Luca.
It was not Dr. Caldwell.
It was someone far worse.
Someone Lorenzo had trusted like blood.
His uncle, Vittorio Moretti.
Vittorio had raised Lorenzo after Lorenzo’s father was killed in a warehouse shooting when Lorenzo was only fourteen. He had taught him how to negotiate, how to survive, how to recognize weakness in men who smiled too easily.
He had also been sitting quietly at the center of the Moretti empire, waiting for the right moment to take it.
Dante met us at the abandoned warehouse before noon.
He arrived alone.
That did not mean I trusted him.
It only meant Lorenzo did.
Dante entered carrying a medical bag and a pistol. He knelt beside Lorenzo, checked the bandages, and gave him an injection to counteract the remaining toxin.
“You should be dead,” Dante muttered.
“So I’ve heard.”
Dante looked toward me.
“And you.”
I stiffened.
“What about me?”
He studied me as if seeing me for the first time.
“You kept him warm for four hours?”
“Yes.”
“You hid him in a linen cart?”
“Yes.”
“You got him through the river tunnel?”
“Yes.”
Dante shook his head slowly.
“Everyone in this city has been calling you quiet for three years.”
“I am quiet.”
“No,” he said. “You are observant. There’s a difference.”
Lorenzo watched me with an expression I could not understand.
Dante placed a tablet on the crate beside us. Security footage filled the screen.
Vittorio entered the underground medical wing at 11:49 p.m., seven minutes after Lorenzo was declared dead. He spoke privately with Dr. Caldwell. Then he met with two men I did not recognize near the elevators.
“There,” Dante said, pointing. “That man is Samuel Rourke. He works for the Cavanaugh organization.”
“So Vittorio made a deal with our enemies,” Lorenzo said.
“He made several.”
Dante swiped through more files.
Vittorio had arranged the ambush. He had supplied Lorenzo’s route. He had ensured the bullets contained the toxin. He had bribed Caldwell to falsify the time of death.
But there was one detail none of us expected.
“He wanted you alive at first,” Dante said.
Lorenzo’s gaze hardened.
“Why?”
“Because he wanted you to sign over the port contracts before you died.”
Dante opened an audio recording.
Vittorio’s voice filled the warehouse.
“Once Lorenzo is incapacitated, the girl will be useful. He listens when she speaks. If necessary, use her to make him cooperate.”
I stopped breathing.
The girl.
Me.
Lorenzo looked at me.
His face changed from anger to something colder.
Something lethal.
“He knows about Bell?”
“Not yet,” Dante said. “But he knows someone helped you escape.”
Lorenzo sat up despite the pain.
“Then we move first.”
Dante frowned. “You’re barely standing.”
“I don’t need to stand long.”
“What are you planning?”
Lorenzo looked at the screen.
“Vittorio expects a funeral tonight.”
“Yes.”
“Then give him one.”
By sunset, word spread across Chicago that Lorenzo Moretti’s body would be displayed at the family chapel before burial.
Every major figure connected to the Moretti organization arrived.
Politicians in dark coats.
Old captains with silver hair.
Young soldiers carrying weapons beneath formal suits.
Rivals pretending to offer condolences.
Vittorio stood at the front of the chapel beside a closed black casket. He wore a perfect black tie and the expression of a grieving uncle.
Inside the casket was not Lorenzo.
It was a collection of weighted blankets beneath a white sheet.
I stood hidden behind a narrow door near the sacristy, wearing a black dress Dante had brought from the estate. I was terrified.
But I was no longer invisible.
Not to Lorenzo.
Not to the people trying to destroy him.
Vittorio stepped toward the microphone.
“My nephew was a difficult man,” he began. “But he loved this family.”
Several men lowered their heads.
Lorenzo’s voice came from the back of the chapel.
“Did I?”
Every person in the room froze.
Vittorio turned slowly.
Lorenzo stood beneath the chapel doors wearing a black coat over his bandages. He was pale, but upright. Dante stood on one side of him. Luca stood on the other.
For once, the cousins were united.
Vittorio’s face drained of color.
“Lorenzo,” he whispered.
“You look disappointed,” Lorenzo said.
The same words he had used with Dante.
Vittorio tried to reach for a weapon.
Dante was faster.
Within seconds, guards surrounded Vittorio. The chapel filled with shouting, but Lorenzo raised one hand.
Silence followed.
Then he looked directly at his uncle.
“You sold my route,” Lorenzo said. “You poisoned me. You ordered doctors to pronounce me dead. And you planned to use an innocent woman to force me into surrender.”
Vittorio’s expression twisted.
“She is not innocent. Nobody survives in this family by being innocent.”
Lorenzo’s eyes shifted toward me.
I stepped from the shadows.
Every head turned.
The maid.
The woman no one had noticed.
Vittorio stared at me with open contempt.
“This?” he asked. “This is the woman you risk everything for?”
Lorenzo walked toward me.
Then, before every powerful man in the chapel, he took my hand.
“No,” he said. “She is the woman who saved everything you tried to take.”
The room went completely still.
Lorenzo turned back toward Vittorio.
“You made one mistake.”
Vittorio laughed bitterly. “Only one?”
“You assumed kindness was weakness.”
Then he handed Dante the evidence.
The footage.
The recordings.
The accounts.
The messages proving Vittorio had worked with the Cavanaugh organization to dismantle the Moretti family from inside.
Vittorio was taken away in handcuffs.
Not by Lorenzo’s men.
By federal agents waiting outside the chapel.
Dante had made a deal hours earlier.
Not to save the Moretti empire as it was.
But to end the parts of it that had poisoned everyone inside.
As Vittorio was led out, he looked back at Lorenzo.
“You think this makes you better than me?”
Lorenzo stood beside me, still holding my hand.
“No,” he said. “But it gives me the chance to become better.”
For the first time, I saw fear in Vittorio Moretti’s eyes.
May you like
And then he was gone.
---
