Chapter 2 - The Bloodline and the Bloodstain
"Get everyone out," Vincent commanded.
He didn't raise his voice, but the order carried the force of an absolute decree.
Marco immediately stepped forward, pulling a heavy radio from his belt while his security men began smoothly and forcefully guiding two hundred confused, whispering guests toward the grand oak exit doors.
"The party is concluded," Marco announced coldly to the crowd. "Please leave your coats at the desk. The Don requests privacy."
"Vincent, you can't be serious!" Vivian shouted, her hands clutching her silk purse so tightly her knuckles turned white. "This is our engagement party! My father invited three city council members! You are humiliating me!"
Vincent stood up slowly from the wet floor. He didn't look at her. Instead, he reached down, took my right hand—the hand covered in small cuts from the broken glass—and gently pulled me up to my feet. He pulled a pristine silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and began carefully wrapping it around my bleeding fingers, his touch surprisingly soft for a man built like a fortress.
"Marco," Vincent said without looking back. "Escort Miss DeMarco to her private quarters upstairs. Place two guards at her door. She is not to make any phone calls, leave the room, or touch a computer until I come upstairs."
"What?!" Vivian shrieked, her voice cracking into a high-pitched panic. "You're locking me in a room?! Because of a plus-sized, incompetent maid who stole a fake piece of jewelry?!"
Vincent stopped wrapping my hand. He turned his head slowly, looking at Vivian with eyes so cold they looked like polished ice.
"If you speak another word in her presence, Vivian," Vincent said softly, "I will not wait for Marco to take you upstairs. I will throw you out into the snow myself, stripped of everything my family has bought you over the past three years."
Vivian choked back her breath, her face turning bright red, then ghostly white. She looked at Marco, who was already stepping toward her with an unyielding, stone-faced expression. Realizing she had lost control of the room, she turned on her heel and stomped up the grand marble staircase, two armed guards trailing closely behind her.
Within five minutes, the massive ballroom was empty. The lights were dimmed, leaving only the soft glow of the grand chandeliers reflecting off the pool of spilled champagne on the floor.
Vincent led me toward a pair of heavy mahogany doors at the far end of the room—his private study. Inside, a fire crackled in a massive stone fireplace, casting deep amber shadows over floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, leather armchairs, and a large antique desk.
He guided me to a plush leather sofa near the fire, pressing a button on his desk intercom. "Send Dr. Vance to my study immediately. Tell him to bring a trauma kit."
"I don't need a doctor, Mr. Moretti," I said quickly, trying to pull my uniform sleeves over my welted arms. "It's just a few scratches. I'm fine."
"You are bleeding, Isabella," Vincent said, sitting down in the chair directly opposite me. His gaze remained locked on my face, searching every line, every curve, as if trying to assemble a three-dimensional puzzle in his head. "And please... call me Vincent. If you are who I think you are... we are blood."
My heart did a strange, violent flip in my chest. "Blood?"
Before Vincent could answer, Marco stepped into the study, holding a thick, dust-covered leather file binder stamped with an old crest.
"Boss," Marco said, his voice trembling slightly as he laid the folder on the glass coffee table between us. "I pulled the archival files from 1998. The arson report from the Brooklyn safehouse. The report filed by Joseph DeMarco."
"Joseph DeMarco?" I repeated, catching the surname immediately. "Vivian's father?"
Vincent’s jaw tightened. "Joseph DeMarco was my father’s underboss twenty-eight years ago. When the Brooklyn safehouse was bombed during the turf war with the Marcone syndicate, Joseph was the officer in charge of securing the estate."
He opened the thick leather folder, revealing faded black-and-white crime scene photos, charred building blueprints, and typed police reports.
"My uncle, Matteo Moretti, had a younger sister," Vincent explained, his voice low and heavy with history. "Her name was Teresa. She was nineteen years old, sweet, quiet, and uninvolved in the family business. She was working as an archivist at a local museum, living quietly away from the syndicate."
Vincent pointed to a photograph of a young woman standing on a balcony—a woman with the exact same dark, almond-shaped eyes and curved features as mine.
"Twenty-eight years ago, Teresa disappeared during the safehouse bombing," Vincent continued. "Joseph DeMarco reported to my father that Teresa was inside the building when it collapsed. He produced a charred silver ring and claimed her body was unrecoverable due to the fire. My father mourned his sister for the rest of his life. He built a chapel in her memory behind this very house."
I stared at the photograph of Teresa. A lump formed in my throat, hot and painful.
"My mother didn't die in a fire," I said softly, my tears finally threatening to break. "She lived in a small, run-down two-bedroom house in South Boston. She worked two jobs—cleaning offices at night and sewing alter garments during the day. She raised me alone."
"Did she ever talk about the Morettis?" Marco asked gently, stepping closer.
"No," I replied, shaking my head. "She never spoke about her family. Whenever I asked about my father or my grandparents, she would get terrified. She would lock the doors, check the windows three times, and tell me that some names were poison. She told me that if anyone ever asked about her past, I was to tell them she was an orphan from Sicily."
I reached up, my trembling fingers touching the silver locket. "The only thing she gave me before she died of cancer three years ago was this. She told me to keep it hidden inside my clothes. She said it was the only thing left of who she really was... but she warned me never to show it to anyone named Moretti or DeMarco."
Vincent leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees, his hands clasped tightly together.
"She warned you because she knew," Vincent whispered, a dark, terrifying realization settling over his face. "Teresa didn't die in that fire. She escaped. Or rather... someone tried to kill her, and she ran for her life."
"Why would anyone try to kill her?" I asked. "You said she was uninvolved in the syndicate."
Vincent looked up at Marco. "Because twenty-eight years ago, my grandfather’s original will was dictated. Under the old Sicilian covenant of the Moretti bloodline, if the primary male heir died without issue, fifty percent of the syndicate's legal real estate assets—worth hundreds of millions today—passed to the youngest daughter and her legitimate heirs."
Marco gasped, the realization hitting him like a thunderbolt. "Joseph DeMarco... if Teresa was dead, Joseph's daughter, Vivian, through her arranged marriage to Vincent, would become the sole female beneficiary of the entire unified estate!"
A heavy, suffocating silence descended on the study.
The pieces of the long, bloody puzzle were fitting together with horrific precision.
My mother hadn't been killed by rival syndicates. She had been targeted by Joseph DeMarco—the ambitious underboss who wanted to clear the path for his own daughter to marry into the Don's bloodline and seize total financial control of the Moretti empire.
And my mother had spent twenty-eight years hiding in poverty, working herself to death to keep me safe, while the man who hunted her lived in a mansion paid for by stolen blood money.
"And how did you end up here, Isabella?" Vincent asked softly, his eyes searching mine. "In Belladonna House? As a maid?"
I swallowed hard, feeling a cold knot form in my stomach. "Two weeks ago, an agency in Manhattan called my apartment. They said a high-profile client specifically requested a maid with archival cleaning experience for a private engagement party. They offered to pay triple my usual rate... but only if I signed a non-disclosure agreement and started immediately."
Vincent’s eyes widened slightly. "Who owned the agency?"
"It was a subsidiary," I said, pulling a crumpled work order from my apron pocket and laying it on the table. "DeMarco Staffing Solutions."
May you like
Vincent stood up slowly. The air in the room suddenly felt twenty degrees colder.
"They didn't just hire you randomly, Isabella," Vincent said, his voice dropping into a deadly whisper. "They knew who you were. They brought you into this house to verify if Teresa’s daughter was still alive... and Vivian was going to ensure you never left this estate tonight."
