Chapter 2 - The Paper Trail of Lies
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The single syllable hung in the warm, humid air of the small alterations shop like a gunshot that refused to dissipate.
Anias felt every muscle in his broad shoulders lock into stone.
His lungs refused to expand as his dark eyes remained pinned to the little boy clinging to Nancy’s neck.
Leland buried his face into the soft fabric of his mother’s beige sweater, peeking out with one wide, curious gray eye.
Those eyes were identical to the ones Anias saw in the mirror every morning when he shaved.
The same heavy brow.
The same sharp, aristocratic curve of the nose that had belonged to three generations of Moretti men.
“Anias, please,” Nancy whispered again, her voice cracking beneath the weight of four years of suffocating silence.
She took a desperate step backward until the edge of her wooden cutting table pressed against the small of her back.
Her hands trembled violently as she pressed Leland’s head against her collarbone, trying desperately to shield him from the imposing figure before them.
“How is he here, Nancy?” Anias asked, his voice low, gravelly, and laced with a terrifying quietness that usually made hardened syndicate capos tremble.
He did not shout.
He did not move an inch closer.
Yet his presence consumed the modest storefront, swallowing the light from the rain-streaked window.
Five years ago, a white medical envelope had landed on his mahogany desk in his Boston penthouse.
Inside that envelope had been a formal discharge summary from a discreet private clinic in upstate New York.
It had borne Nancy’s signature.
It had detailed the termination of a six-week pregnancy.
And along with those papers had been the signed divorce decree, stripping his life of the only light it had ever known.
He had spent months drinking himself to the brink of madness, staring at that cold clinical document, believing she had destroyed their child because she despised his violent world.
“He shouldn’t exist,” Anias breathed, the words tearing from his throat like broken glass.
“He shouldn’t exist because you told me you got rid of him.”
Tears welled in Nancy’s hazel eyes, spilling over her pale cheeks in silent, burning streams.
She shook her head with frantic, desperate energy.
“I never touched that clinic, Anias!” she sobbed in a harsh whisper, mindful of the child in her arms.
“I never signed those papers!”
Before Anias could absorb the shock of her words, the brass bell above the door rattled loudly.
The door swung open, letting in a gust of cold autumn rain and the heavy scent of wet asphalt.
Carmine stood in the doorway, his broad frame filling the entrance, his hand resting instinctively inside his tailored charcoal wool coat.
“Boss?” Carmine’s sharp eyes darted across the room, taking in the trembling woman, the crying child, and the rigid stance of his don.
“The meeting next door is waiting, and we’ve got a car lingering at the corner that doesn’t look friendly.”
“Get out, Carmine,” Anias ordered without turning his head.
The command was absolute.
“Boss, the street—”
“I said get out and lock the door behind you,” Anias growled, his voice vibrating with lethal finality.
Carmine hesitated for only a fraction of a second before stepping back onto the pavement and pulling the door shut until the latch clicked.
Silence descended upon the shop once more, save for the clicking radiator and the sound of Nancy’s ragged breath.
Anias slowly reached into his inner pocket, not for a weapon, but for the ghost that had haunted his chest for half a decade.
May you like
He looked at Nancy, his jaw grinding until his teeth ached.
“If you didn’t sign those papers, Nancy, then who did?”
