Chapter 8 - The Bloodline
The world stopped spinning. The ground beneath my boots seemed to dissolve, leaving me falling into an icy, bottomless void.
"No," I whispered, shaking my head violently. "No. That’s... that’s a lie. That’s an insane lie she wrote to mess with your head."
Luca didn't move. He didn't drop the book. His gray eyes stared down at me with an expression I had never seen on his face before—not anger, not cold calculation, but a deep, hollow shock that stripped away every layer of his mob boss exterior.
"Emma," he said, his voice cracked at the edges.
"My mother was Mary Reed!" I cried, backing away until my shoulders hit the cold, wet marble of the Archangel statue. "She worked at the bakery on 22nd Street! She died of leukemia when I was twelve! She raised me and Clara in a two-room flat!"
"Mary Reed was my father's private secretary," Luca said, his words coming out slow, heavy, like lead weights dropping into water. "She left the company abruptly in the winter of '97. My father gave her an apartment in Bridgeport and a pension that was paid out of a blind trust."
He flipped the ledger back three pages, pointing the flashlight directly at a line written in his father's handwriting:
October 14, 1997 – M.R. Trust – Settlement of infant Emma – $40,000 – Paid in full.
"He hid you," Luca whispered. "My mother was dying of cancer that year. If the family had known he had a daughter with his secretary... the scandal would have fractured the North Side alliance."
"I am not your sister," I choked out, tears finally breaking through, hot and stinging against my cold cheeks. "I scrubbed your floors, Luca! I carried your dirty plates! I stood behind your chair while your fiancée called me a thief! You watched her break my wrist!"
"Because I didn't know!" he roared, the sudden violence in his voice tearing through the garden fog like thunder.
Mateo took two steps back, keeping his eyes on the ground, pretending he was somewhere else on earth.
Luca stepped toward me, his hands shaking slightly as he closed the distance. He reached out with his right hand, not with the iron grip of a boss, but with an agonizing, hesitant tenderness. He touched the side of my face, his thumb catching a falling tear.
"I didn't know, Emma," he whispered. "I swear to you on everything our father built, I didn't know."
The irony was a poison knife in my gut. All those years of poverty. All those nights sitting by the radiator with Clara, splitting a single can of soup, worrying about the gas bill, while thirty miles north, my own blood was sleeping beneath crystal chandeliers and gold-leaf ceilings.
"Vanessa knew," I said, the venom rising in my throat. "That's why she targeted me. That's why she cornered me in the pantry."
"Yes," Luca said, his eyes darkening into pure, unadulterated murder. "Under syndicate law, if a boss dies without a legitimate male heir, and there is an unrecognized blood child... the entire estate passes to the recognized daughter if she claims the name before the Commission."
He looked down at the ledger in his hands.
"Vanessa didn't want the thirty million," Luca said. "She wanted you dead. Because if you die, and I die, Julian is the only claimant left. And she controls Julian."
The sound of car tires crunching over gravel echoed from the front driveway of the mansion.
May you like
Two cars. Heavy doors slamming shut.
Mateo spun around, drawing his weapon. "Boss. Front gate sensors just tripped. It's Julian. And he isn't alone."
