Chapter 3 - The Secret in the Kitchen
The room fell into an absolute, suffocating silence.
The click of the radiator beneath the window sounded like a hammer striking iron. Oliver rested his chin on his father’s shoulder, looking over at Emma with a small, sleepy smile, but Christian did not move a muscle.
His slate-gray eyes moved from Emma’s face, down to her small hands, and back up to the curl of her dark hair.
Slowly, with the agonized precision of a man assembling an impossible truth, Christian turned his head toward me.
"Sophia," Christian whispered. His voice was cracked, raw, stripped of every shred of armor. "How old is she?"
"Christian, don't," I pleaded, my hands clenching into the fabric of my scrubs.
"How old is she, Sophia?" he repeated, rising to his full six-foot-three height, setting Oliver gently onto the kitchen chair.
"She's six," I answered, refusing to look away, my chin lifting in defiance. "She was born in May. At Mount Sinai."
Christian staggered back half a step, his shoulder brushing against the wooden pantry door.
Six years ago, when his family’s rival faction had detonated a car bomb outside his Manhattan office, I had realized that the violence surrounding House Moretti would never end. When I discovered I was pregnant three days later, I made the agonizing choice to disappear into the working-class avenues of Queens, determined that my child would never know the shadow of a gun.
"You took my daughter," Christian murmured, his eyes shining with an overwhelming mixture of heartbreak and awe. "You raised my daughter in this house, thirty minutes from my estate, and you never told me."
"I raised a child who sleeps peacefully at night, Christian," I countered, stepping in front of Emma, sheltering her small body behind my legs. "I raised a girl who doesn't have armed sentries outside her bedroom window. Look at what happened to Oliver tonight! He was wandering alone in the freezing rain at ten o'clock because someone in your world let him slip away!"
Oliver looked up from his chair, pointing a small finger at the floor. "Aunt Beatrice told me to wait in the car while she bought medicine, Papa. But the car doors were unlocked, and a man in a black van tried to open the window, so I ran away into the trees."
Christian’s face instantly hardened into terrifying, sub-zero granite.
"Beatrice," Christian said, the name dropping from his lips like a toxic verdict.
Beatrice Vance—his late wife’s younger sister, the woman who had lived in his Long Island estate for two years under the guise of helping raise young Oliver.
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Christian pulled his phone from his coat, dialing a single number on the encrypted keypad.
"Marco," Christian commanded, his voice cold enough to freeze water. "Seal the Long Island compound. Place Beatrice Vance in the lower security vault. If she attempts to leave the property, shoot the tires off her vehicle."
