Chapter 5 - DINNER WITH THE MAN WHO STOLE SIX YEARS
Matteo chose Bellini’s Steakhouse.
Not related to Viktor Bellini.
Just an old Chicago restaurant where we had eaten since we were twenty-two and broke enough to split one steak.
He ordered bourbon.
I ordered water.
He laughed.
“You sick?”
“No.”
“New discipline?”
“My daughter would approve.”
The word left my mouth before I could stop it.
Matteo’s glass paused.
Only for half a second.
“What?”
I smiled.
“Donation event. Kids everywhere. One called me Dad.”
There.
I watched him.
A good liar does not freeze.
He laughed.
“Poor kid.”
My blood turned cold.
Poor kid.
“What?”
“Imagine getting you.”
I smiled too.
Inside, I saw his face over Alina’s recording.
By then, he’ll hate her for leaving.
I cut into my steak.
“How are things?”
“Boring.”
“Warehouse Twelve?”
“Fine.”
“Owen?”
“Still ugly.”
Normal.
Perfectly normal.
The man had buried my wife and daughter beneath lies and could still joke about an employee’s face.
I wondered how many years of friendship had been real.
Maybe some.
That was the worst possibility.
If Matteo had always hated me, betrayal was simple.
If he once loved me and chose power later—
that was harder.
He leaned back.
“You look tired.”
“Bad sleep.”
“Still nightmares?”
He knew.
Of course he knew.
For years, after Alina vanished, Matteo stayed at my house when I drank too much.
He took guns from my hand.
He sat silently through nights I could not breathe.
Was that guilt?
Or maintenance?
“Sometimes.”
He nodded sympathetically.
“How was the orphanage?”
“Fine.”
“Director nice?”
“Yes.”
“Records clean?”
There.
Too specific.
I sipped water.
“What records?”
He shrugged.
“You were making a five-million-dollar donation. I assume your accountant checked them.”
Smooth recovery.
“Probably.”
Dinner continued.
Then I tried something.
“Daniel Mercer called.”
Matteo did not move.
“What did that cockroach want?”
“Estate paperwork.”
“Yours?”
“No. Old property.”
“Tell him to bill me. I owe him enough.”
The hatred sounded real.
Maybe because Daniel betrayed him.
I leaned forward.
“Matteo.”
“Yeah?”
“You ever think I should have kept looking?”
Silence.
There it was.
Not visible fear.
Something smaller.
Calculation.
“For Alina?”
“And Sophia.”
He looked down.
“Sometimes.”
“Why did you tell me to stop?”
He sighed.
“Marco.”
“I’m asking.”
“Because you were dying.”
“I was alive.”
“Barely.”
He looked at me.
“You hadn’t slept in months. You had men kicking in doors in four states. One investigator got shot in Michigan. Every lead made you worse.”
All true.
That was how good manipulation worked.
It used truth as structure.
Matteo continued.
“And Alina’s note asked you to let them go.”
Yes.
The note.
Please don’t look for us.
Had she written it freely?
Her later letter suggested Matteo instructed the disappearance.
Maybe the note too.
“Did you believe she was afraid of me?”
Matteo hesitated.
“I believed she was afraid of the life.”
“Difference?”
“Not to people outside it.”
That answer could have been wisdom.
From another man.
I finished dinner.
He paid.
Always had.
Outside, he hugged me.
A full embrace.
Brotherly.
His hand slapped my back.
For one terrible second, I remembered being fourteen.
Matteo teaching me to drive his father’s Buick.
Seventeen.
Fighting three older boys beside me.
Twenty-three.
Holding my first child before she died at birth? No, not introduced. Avoid.
Thirty.
Standing beside me at my wedding.
History does not become fake just because the ending is betrayal.
Sometimes that makes betrayal worse.
“I’m here,” he said.
The same words I had told Sophia.
I nearly killed him right there.
Instead, I stepped back.
“I know.”
My phone buzzed in the car.
Nico.
Owen Blake left Warehouse Twelve forty minutes ago. Destination unknown.
Then:
Luca Ferretti also missing.
Matteo had moved pieces while we ate.
Maybe dinner was not friendship.
Maybe it was containment.
I called Nico.
“Where’s Sophia?”
“Safe house three.”
“No.”
“What?”
“Move.”
“Why?”
“Matteo knows something.”
“How?”
“He always knows something.”
I looked back at the restaurant.
Matteo had not exited yet.
“Independent location. No Vitelli properties.”
“Understood.”
We moved Sophia to Rebecca Sloan’s sister’s farmhouse outside Naperville.
No organization connection.
No staff.
Nico came.
Daniel too, against my preference.
“He knows Alina’s codes,” Rebecca argued.
Fine.
Sophia sat at the kitchen table drawing.
She looked at Daniel.
“Uncle Danny.”
He smiled sadly.
“Still worried too much.”
“Yes.”
She handed him a purple crayon.
“Draw.”
The feared lawyer who had hidden people under false identities spent twenty minutes drawing a terrible horse.
Sophia told him it looked like a dog.
I stood at the window.
Nico joined me.
“Federal contact.”
“Who?”
“Assistant U.S. Attorney Lena Morales.”
I looked at him.
“She prosecute us?”
“Not directly. Organized corruption. Financial crime.”
“Clean?”
“As clean as I can find.”
“That isn’t reassuring.”
“No.”
We met Lena the next morning at a suburban hotel.
She did not look impressed by me.
Good.
“I’m not offering immunity,” she said before sitting.
“I didn’t ask.”
“You will eventually.”
“Maybe.”
“You understand if you give me evidence involving murder, bribery, money laundering, and organized crime, I may find crimes committed by you.”
“Yes.”
She studied me.
“Why come?”
I thought of Sophia.
“Because the man I need to stop owns too many people inside my world.”
That answer she understood.
I gave her copies.
Not originals.
She noticed.
“Trust issues?”
“Yes.”
“Healthy.”
She listened to Alina’s recording.
Read the ledger.
Saw the photograph.
Her expression changed.
“We can work with this.”
“Can you arrest Matteo?”
“Not today.”
My jaw tightened.
“Why?”
“Because one recording and a private ledger require authentication.”
“It’s his voice.”
“In your world, maybe that’s enough.”
She leaned forward.
“In mine, I want the case to survive lawyers.”
Daniel confirmed authenticity.
Still not enough.
Lena wanted transaction records.
Witnesses.
Corroboration.
Owen Blake.
Luca Ferretti.
Daniel.
Harbor Search Group.
We could build it.
Then my phone rang.
Unknown number.
I answered.
A woman’s voice.
“Is this Marco Vitelli?”
My heart stopped.
“Yes.”
Silence.
Then:
“Do you know someone named Anna Moretti?”
Alina’s hiding identity.
I stood.
“Who is this?”
“Nurse Rebecca Shaw. I work at a community clinic in Rockford.”
My legs almost failed.
“When did you see her?”
Pause.
“This morning.”
The room disappeared.
“She’s there?”
“Not anymore.”
I gripped the table.
“Was she hurt?”
“No.”
“Where did she go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why are you calling me?”
“Because she left this number six months ago with instructions.”
“What instructions?”
“If a child named Lily Moretti was ever found by a man named Marco Vitelli…”
My chest stopped.
“…call him and say she is alive.”
I could not breathe.
Lena watched me.
Nico stood.
Daniel covered his mouth.
I whispered, “Say it again.”
The nurse’s voice softened.
May you like
“Your wife is alive, Mr. Vitelli.”
The world I had lived in for six years broke apart in one sentence.
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