Chapter 2 - RUTH’S LAST SIX CHILDREN
Dante Calvetti remained on his knees in front of Tommy while the condemned warehouse groaned around us.
For the first time in six months, the man I had watched terrify bankers and politicians seemed to have forgotten that anyone else existed.
Tommy studied the scar along Dante’s jaw.
“You really aren’t my daddy?”
Dante’s expression tightened with an emotion too complicated for a five-year-old to understand.
“No, piccolo. I don’t think I am.”
Tommy’s shoulders fell.
Dante gently turned the boy’s silver locket between two gloved fingers.
“But Ruth was my family once. That makes me yours until we learn the truth.”
Marcus still held the rusted pipe. The twelve-year-old’s hands shook, but his stance remained defiant.
“We don’t need you.”
Dante looked at him.
“You are living beneath a condemned building with three kerosene heaters, no emergency exit, and enough carbon monoxide in the air to kill everyone before morning.”
“We have Liv.”
Every child moved closer to me.
Dante rose slowly.
His storm-gray eyes found mine.
“And what does Liv have?”
The question cut deeper than I expected.
I had forged documents, lied to social workers, stolen supplies from hospital loading docks, and worked until my hands cramped so six children could remain together. Yet I had never possessed enough money to give them what they deserved.
“I have kept them alive,” I said.
“For eighteen months.”
“Yes.”
“Alone?”
“Yes.”
Something fierce moved across his face.
“Why didn’t Ruth call me?”
“She did.”
He went still.
“She called the number you left twenty-eight years ago. A man told her Dante Calvetti had no memory of street women or abandoned children.”
Dante turned toward one of his armed men.
“Matteo.”
The security chief lowered his gaze.
“I don’t know who took the call, boss.”
“Find out.”
A deep metallic bang echoed through the warehouse.
Dust drifted from the ceiling.
Dante’s men immediately raised their rifles.
Matteo touched a hand to his earpiece.
“We have vehicles approaching from the south alley. Six, maybe eight men. No visible police markings.”
My blood turned cold.
“This is Carbone territory,” I whispered.
Enzo Carbone controlled most of the illegal operations south of Garfield Boulevard. Ruth had always warned us never to attract his attention.
Dante’s expression became lethal.
“You brought children into Carbone territory?”
“It was the only building no city inspector entered.”
“Because Carbone uses the upper floors for weapons storage.”
I looked toward the ceiling.
For eighteen months, I had hidden six children beneath an armory without knowing it.
Gunfire erupted outside.
Dante moved before I did. He grabbed Tommy, thrust him into my arms, and ordered the other children behind the brick boiler wall.
His men killed the tactical lights. Darkness swallowed the basement.
“Stay low,” Dante commanded.
A blast tore through the service entrance.
Fragments of steel struck the far wall. Isabelle screamed. Sophie covered her twin’s mouth while Marcus crouched in front of them.
Men charged down the stairs.
Dante’s guards fired controlled bursts. The sound inside the concrete room was unbearable.
I crawled toward the rear utility hatch.
“It opens into the drainage tunnel,” I told Matteo. “The children can escape that way.”
He checked the rusted hatch.
“Padlocked from the other side.”
Jonah tugged my sleeve.
“Ruth kept a key under the blue brick.”
He crawled to the wall, pried loose a painted brick, and retrieved a small brass key.
Ruth had prepared an escape route and never told me.
Or perhaps she had tried.
Matteo unlocked the hatch. Bitter air rushed inside.
I pushed Lily, the twins, and Jonah through first. Marcus refused to go until Tommy and I entered. Dante remained near the stairs, returning fire beside his men.
“Dante!” I shouted.
He looked back.
For a terrible second, the halogen light illuminated him exactly like the bruised eight-year-old in Ruth’s photograph.
Then he fired twice, retreated, and entered the tunnel behind us.
We crawled for nearly two hundred yards through frozen mud. Tommy wheezed against my shoulder. His fever had worsened, and every breath produced a frightening whistle.
“He needs a nebulizer,” I said.
Dante crawled closer.
“Where is it?”
“In the basement.”
“We’re not going back.”
“He could stop breathing.”
Dante spoke into his radio.
“Medical team to the north drainage outlet. Pediatric respiratory equipment. Now.”
“You have a pediatric medical team?”
“I have everything money can purchase.”
The bitterness in his voice told me he had already realized money had not purchased knowledge of Ruth’s death.
We emerged behind an abandoned church. Three armored SUVs waited with engines running. Dante’s doctor treated Tommy inside the first vehicle while the others huddled beneath heated blankets.
Marcus refused to release the iron pipe until Matteo gently replaced it with a flashlight.
“This works better in the dark,” Matteo told him.
Marcus accepted it.
As the convoy moved north, explosions illuminated the warehouse behind us.
Carbone’s men were destroying the building.
The only home the children remembered burned beneath the Chicago sky.
Lily pressed her face to the window.
“Our books are in there.”
“We’ll replace them,” Dante said.
“You can’t replace the notes Ruth wrote in them.”
Dante had no answer.
His penthouse occupied the top four floors of Calvetti Tower. I expected armed men, marble floors, and cold rooms designed to intimidate visitors.
I did not expect the unused children’s wing.
Six bedrooms opened from a private family room decorated with cloud-shaped lights and shelves of untouched toys. Dust covered several boxes.
Dante stopped in the doorway as if he had forgotten the rooms existed.
“My mother designed this floor,” he said. “Before she died.”
Tommy slept in Dante’s arms, weakened by fever medicine. The sight of the feared syndicate boss carrying a small child seemed to unsettle his men more than the gunfight had.
I placed the others together in the largest bedroom. None wanted to sleep alone.
Marcus chose the floor beside the door.
“You may use the bed,” Dante told him.
“I watch the entrance.”
“That is my security team’s job.”
“They weren’t there before.”
Dante accepted the rebuke.
He had cots brought in so all six could remain together.
After the children fell asleep, Dante summoned me to his study.
His intelligence team had placed my forged employment file on the desk.
The canvas bag lay beside it.
He removed the laminated photograph I had protected for eighteen months.
“Who are you?”
“Liv Harper.”
“No.”
His voice remained quiet.
That made lying harder.
“Your Social Security number belongs to a woman who died in Arizona. Your college records were manufactured. Your references route through encrypted numbers.”
“I needed employment.”
“You chose mine.”
“You paid enough to feed six children.”
“I also employ investigators who could have found your lies in an hour.”
“You didn’t investigate me.”
Dante’s gaze sharpened.
“Because Ruth’s name was buried inside your background file. Someone wanted you close to me without allowing me to know why.”
I had not known that.
The black-market hacker who cleaned my history had been recommended through one of Ruth’s old contacts.
Perhaps my arrival at Calvetti Tower had never been an accident.
Dante opened Tommy’s locket.
Inside the lid, beneath the initials, ran a shallow groove. He pressed it with a letter opener.
The interior panel released.
A tightly folded strip of paper fell onto the desk.
Dante unfolded it.
The handwriting belonged to Ruth.
Dante—if Tommy reaches you, Sofia is dead and they have begun hunting the children. Do not trust the man who answers your private telephone. Open the west wall before Vincent finds it.
Dante read the message twice.
“Vincent Bellini is my consigliere,” he said. “He has answered my private line for twenty years.”
The study door opened.
Vincent stood on the other side.
He was sixty, silver-haired, and elegant, with the patient expression of a beloved uncle.
His gaze moved from me to Ruth’s message.
Then to the sleeping child visible through the security monitor.
Vincent smiled.
“You finally found the boy,” he said.
Dante’s hand moved toward the pistol beneath his jacket.
Vincent was faster.
He pressed a button on his phone.
May you like
Every lock in the penthouse engaged at once.
Gas began hissing through the nursery vents.
