Chapter 4 - The Woman Who Vanished
By 10:00 a.m., the gray morning sky over the Hudson River had turned into a full-scale winter blizzard. Heavy, wet snow whipped across the Westchester hills, coating the long winding driveways and tree branches in a thick white blanket.
The Moretti estate was locked down under maximum security protocol.
Eighteen heavily armed guards in winter tactical gear patrolled the perimeter walls. The outer gates were chained shut. Inside the main house, the staff had been instructed to remain in the service quarters, except for Claire Bennett, who had been brought upstairs to the master suite to care for the infant under Cole Mercer’s watchful eye.
In his second-floor private study—a massive, wood-paneled room filled with dark leather furniture, high-security computer monitors, and wall-mounted maps of the New York port terminals—Gabriel sat behind his desk.
The Polaroid photograph lay in the center of the green leather blotter.
Beside it sat a thick leather folder containing everything Gabriel’s private intelligence network possessed on Natalie Hart.
Cole Mercer stood on the other side of the desk, holding a tablet computer connected to a encrypted military satellite feed.
“We ran her name, her Social Security number, her banking records, and her vehicle registration,” Cole said, his voice clipped and efficient. “Natalie Hart vanished from New York three days after you broke off contact with her last April.”
Gabriel raised his eyes. “Vanished?”
“She closed her art studio on 10th Avenue in Soho,” Cole reported, tapping the tablet screen. “She liquidated her small savings account—about forty-two thousand dollars—and closed her lease. Her primary cell phone was deactivated on April 28th. She didn't buy a plane ticket, she didn't rent a car under her name, and she didn't file a change of address with the postal service.”
Gabriel’s jaw tightened until the jaw muscles bulged along his neck. “A woman doesn't just evaporate in twenty-four hours, Cole. Where did she go?”
“She went into hiding,” Cole said flatly. “And she used cash.”
Cole pressed a button on the tablet, projecting a high-resolution map of upstate New York onto the wall monitor behind Gabriel’s desk.
“Our intelligence guys tracked a series of small cash withdrawals from automated teller machines along Route 9 North during the first week of May,” Cole continued. “She bought a ten-year-old Subaru Outback from a private seller in Poughkeepsie for four thousand dollars in cash. She registered the vehicle under her mother’s maiden name—Natalie Vance.”
Gabriel leaned forward, his elbows resting on the desk, his massive hands clasped together. “Where did she live for the last nine months?”
“A small, isolated lake cabin near Lake Placid,” Cole said, pointing to a small red dot on the Adirondack mountain map. “Population four hundred. No streetlights, no corporate stores. She rented the cabin from an elderly widow who didn't ask for credit checks or background screening. She paid six months of rent upfront in cash.”
Gabriel looked at the red dot on the map.
Lake Placid. Three hundred miles north of Westchester, deep in the frozen wilderness of the Adirondacks.
She had gone there alone. Pregnant. Scared. Carrying a child she believed belonged to a mob boss who had abandoned her.
A dark, visceral wave of guilt—heavy and suffocating—surged through Gabriel’s chest. He remembered the night he had broken things off with her in her Soho loft. He remembered standing in her doorway, wearing his dark coat, keeping his voice cold and emotionless as he told her that their relationship was a mistake, that he didn't love her, that he never wanted to see her again.
He had lied to her. He had said those terrible words to make her hate him, so she would walk away and build a safe, peaceful life far from his violent world.
He had thought he was protecting her.
Instead, he had driven a pregnant woman into the frozen wilderness alone.
“What happened three days ago, Cole?” Gabriel asked, his voice shaking with a dangerous, quiet heat. “Why did she leave Lake Placid?”
Cole took a deep breath, his face setting into a dark, grim expression. He tapped the tablet again, switching the wall monitor to a series of police department crime scene photographs.
The photographs showed a small, snow-covered wooden cabin in the woods.
The front door had been smashed inward off its iron hinges. The living room was destroyed—furniture overturned, oil paintings slashed, drawers ripped from dressers and dumped onto the floorboards.
And on the snow outside the front porch were heavy bloodstains.
Gabriel stood up from his desk so fast his heavy leather chair slammed into the wall behind him.
“What is that?” Gabriel growled, pointing a thick finger at the monitor. “Whose blood is that?!”
“Local sheriff’s department responded to a break-in report at the cabin on Friday morning,” Cole explained quickly. “The neighbor who called it in said he heard gunshots around 2:00 a.m. When the deputies arrived, the cabin was cleared out. Natalie was gone. The baby was gone. The blood on the porch... forensic field tests show it belongs to two different individuals.”
“Who?!” Gabriel shouted, stepping around his desk, grabbing Cole by his tactical vest collar with one hand, hauling the two-hundred-pound security chief off his feet. “Whose blood, Cole?!”
“One sample belongs to a man,” Cole choked out, his eyes wide as he met Gabriel’s terrifying glare. “Type O-negative. The local police found three shell casings from a nine-millimeter weapon inside the doorway. One of the intruders was shot.”
“And the second sample?” Gabriel demanded, his grip tightening until the vest fabric groaned.
“Type A-positive,” Cole whispered. “It matches Natalie Hart’s medical records from New York.”
Gabriel froze.
Type A-positive.
She had been wounded. Friday morning. Two days ago.
She had been shot or cut in her cabin in Lake Placid, fought off armed intruders, taken her six-day-old infant, driven three hundred miles through a winter storm to Westchester, dropped the child over his perimeter wall with a note, and vanished back into the blizzard.
Gabriel let go of Cole’s vest. Cole stumbled back, catching his balance against the mahogany desk, gasping for air.
Gabriel walked over to the floor-to-ceiling glass window overlooking the snow-covered grounds.
His mind was racing at terrifying speed, connecting the pieces of a nightmare that had been quietly building in the shadows while he sat in his warm office counting shipping profits.
This wasn't an abandonment. Natalie hadn't left her child by the dumpster because she didn't want him.
She had brought Daniel to Westchester because she was being hunted. She had sacrificed her own survival, driven through the freezing wilderness while bleeding from a gunshot wound, to leave her baby at the only place on Earth where armed men stood guard twenty-four hours a day.
She had brought the child to the monster who had broken her heart, because she knew the monster would kill anyone who tried to touch his blood.
“Who broke into that cabin, Cole?” Gabriel asked softly, turning back toward his security chief, his pale gray eyes shining with an inhuman, murderous light.
Cole pulled a small black folder from his jacket.
“The shell casings recovered from the cabin floorboards weren't standard commercial ammunition, Gabriel,” Cole said, handing him a high-resolution forensic photograph of three brass cartridge cases. “They were Swiss-manufactured RUAG nine-millimeter armor-piercing rounds. High-grade military contract stuff.”
Gabriel looked at the photograph. He knew those casings.
Only one organization in the Tri-State area imported Swiss RUAG armor-piercing ammunition through the Newark dry docks.
The Valenti crime family.
Led by Don Carmine Valenti—a seventy-year-old sociopath who had fought Gabriel’s father for twenty years over control of the Jersey shipping terminals and the Manhattan construction unions.
Gabriel stared at the photograph of the ammunition casings.
“Carmine Valenti,” Gabriel whispered, his voice smooth and cold as liquid nitrogen.
“It gets worse, Boss,” Cole said, his voice dropping into a tense whisper. “Carmine Valenti’s eldest son, Dominic Valenti, was admitted to a private, off-the-books surgical clinic in South Jersey at 8:00 a.m. yesterday morning.”
“With what injury?” Gabriel asked.
“A nine-millimeter gunshot wound to his left thigh,” Cole revealed. “Dominic Valenti was at that cabin in Lake Placid on Friday night. He was the man who smashed down Natalie’s door.”
Gabriel stood silent in his study for three long, agonizing minutes.
The blizzard outside rattled the heavy windowpanes, blowing white clouds across the dark pine trees.
Downstairs, in the master bedroom, his potential son was sleeping in a warm bed under the care of a housekeeper.
And three hundred miles away, or somewhere in the dark streets between Lake Placid and Manhattan, Natalie Hart was bleeding, alone, hunted by the most vicious crew in New York.
Gabriel walked over to his wall safe behind the mahogany bookcase. He turned the digital combination dial with rapid, mechanical precision.
The heavy steel safe door swung open with a soft hiss.
Inside sat three million dollars in untraceable cash stacks, four offshore satellite passports, and a custom, hand-tooled leather shoulder holster holding a black-finish Sig Sauer P226 pistol with four extended magazines.
Gabriel pulled the shoulder holster from the safe and strapped it over his dark wool sweater.
“Gabriel?” Cole asked, stepping forward with genuine concern. “What are you doing?”
Gabriel pulled the Sig Sauer P226 from its holster, racked the slide back with a sharp, heavy CLACK, chambering a nine-millimeter round, then clicked the safety on.
He looked at Cole Mercer with eyes that had completely ceased to belong to a civilized human being.
“Mobilize Team Alpha and Team Bravo,” Gabriel commanded quietly. “Twenty men. Full tactical gear. Suppressed weapons. Armored Suburbans.”
“Where are we going, Boss?”
May you like
Gabriel picked up the Polaroid photograph of Natalie from his desk, slid it carefully into his interior breast pocket directly over his heart, and looked out at the raging snowstorm.
“We are going to find Dominic Valenti,” Gabriel said. “And then we are going to burn Jersey to the ground.”
