Chapter 4 - Blood and Truth
The attack lasted eleven minutes.
Later, everyone would call it a message.
Vincent called it an act of war.
Theresa remembered only fragments: Enzo pulling her through a hidden corridor; the thunder of shots above them; Alberto’s nurse praying under her breath; her own voice repeating Mateo’s name until it no longer sounded like a word.
The safe room was beneath the old wine cellar, reinforced steel hidden behind a wall of vintage bottles. Vincent had built it years ago, Theresa realized. Before she had left. Before he had known he would need it for a son.
“How long?” she demanded.
Enzo checked his phone. “The boss has him.”
“Are you sure?”
Enzo’s face hardened. “Vincent doesn’t fail the people he loves.”
The words stayed with her.
Twenty minutes later, the steel door opened.
Vincent stepped inside with Mateo in his arms.
Their son was pale but unhurt, his face buried in Vincent’s shoulder. Vincent’s white shirt was stained red at the sleeve.
Theresa ran to them.
“Mateo!”
“I’m okay,” the boy said, though his voice trembled. “Mister Vincent found me.”
Vincent carefully set him down.
“He was under the kitchen table,” Vincent said. “He did exactly what you taught him.”
Theresa dropped to her knees and pulled Mateo against her. She held him so tightly he squeaked.
“Mama,” he whispered, “you’re hurting me.”
She loosened her grip at once, tears falling into his hair.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Mateo looked up at Vincent.
“Are you bleeding?”
Vincent glanced at his arm as if he had forgotten it existed. “It’s nothing.”
“It doesn’t look like nothing.”
The boy’s voice was serious.
Vincent crouched down, ignoring the blood soaking through his cuff.
“It’s a scratch.”
Mateo thought about that. “My teacher says scratches still need to be cleaned.”
For one second, Vincent’s mouth almost smiled.
“Your teacher sounds smart.”
“She is.”
Theresa watched them, and the truth she had denied for years became impossible to avoid. Mateo did not need a father shaped from fairy tales.
He needed the real one.
Even if the real one terrified her.
Later, when Mateo was asleep in a guarded room beside the safe room, Vincent found Theresa in the cellar.
She stood among old bottles of wine, staring at nothing.
“You should let the doctor look at your arm,” she said.
“He did.”
“You should rest.”
“I don’t sleep when someone shoots at my son.”
The possessiveness in his voice should have angered her.
Instead, it hurt.
Vincent stepped closer. “Marco Bellini ordered this.”
“You know that?”
“One of the shooters survived.”
Theresa’s face went cold. “What did he say?”
“He said Marco wants the key.”
She shut her eyes.
Vincent’s voice softened. “Theresa. Tell me everything.”
For a moment she could not speak.
Then she did.
She told him about the night Marco found her outside the old cathedral. About the men in the black car. About the photograph. About Marco’s promise that Vincent would die before their child was born if she did not disappear.
“I thought I could protect you,” she whispered. “I thought if you believed I left you, you would let me go.”
Vincent’s face twisted.
“You should have trusted me.”
“I did trust you.” Her voice rose. “That was why I left. Because I knew you would come after me. I knew you would start a war. I knew people would die.”
“And you decided alone that I didn’t deserve to know I had a child?”
“I decided alone because I was twenty-three and terrified!”
Silence.
The cellar seemed to breathe around them.
Vincent looked away first.
“I searched for you,” he said. “For years.”
Theresa’s anger wavered.
“I know.”
“No. You don’t.” He looked back at her, gray eyes stripped of their coldness. “I searched every port, every airport, every account your father ever touched. I found nothing. Your father told me you were alive, but he made me swear not to hunt you.”
“Why would you listen?”
“Because he said you hated me.”
Theresa’s breath caught.
Vincent came closer, until only inches separated them.
“I thought you looked at me and saw the worst thing in your life,” he said.
“I looked at you and saw the thing I couldn’t survive losing.”
His hand lifted, slowly, as though asking permission. His fingers touched her cheek.
The contact was almost unbearable.
Then Enzo’s voice crackled through Vincent’s phone.
“Boss. We found something.”
Vincent answered without taking his eyes from Theresa. “What?”
“A car left the property during the attack. One of Alberto’s staff. We caught him trying to cross into Queens.”
“Who?”
Enzo paused.
“Dr. Rafael Moretti.”
Theresa went still.
Dr. Moretti had delivered Mateo.
He had been with her in Sicily.
He had known where she lived.
Vincent’s hand fell away from her face.
And suddenly, Theresa understood.
Marco had not found them by chance.
May you like
He had been watching them all along.
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