Chapter 2 - The Stolen Voice
“Blackwood heir?”
The word was a whip cracking through the suffocating silence of the ballroom. I stared at the phone screen in Vanessa’s manicured hand. The boy in the video couldn’t have been older than five. He had the distinctive high cheekbones of the Blackwood lineage, the stubborn tilt of the chin, and those piercing cornflower-blue eyes—the exact eyes of my younger brother, Gabriel, who had supposedly perished in an offshore yacht fire four years ago.
Emma let out an agonized sob, her hands flying to her mouth. “Leo… oh God, Leo!”
“Dominic!” I roared, my voice cutting through the panic like an axe. “Clear the ballroom! Seal every entrance! Disarm the Sterling security detail!”
My enforcers moved like a black tide. In thirty seconds, the guests were escorted out through the service corridors, while Vanessa’s eight private bodyguards were disarmed and thrown face-down onto the marble tiles with tactical muzzles pressed against their necks. The massive double doors of the ballroom slammed shut and bolted.
I took two predatory strides, snatched the phone from Vanessa’s fingers, and clamped my left hand around her pearl-draped throat, pinning her against the white floral arch until her heels dangled off the ground.
“Whose child is that?” I growled, my Kimber .45 pressing hard beneath her chin.
Vanessa gasped for breath, her face turning crimson, but her cruel smile never wavered. “Ask your little maid, Damien! Ask her why she spent three years playing mute under your roof while hiding your brother’s bastard child in an off-grid Catholic orphanage!”
I dropped Vanessa to the marble floor, where she coughed violently, clutching her bruised neck. I spun toward Emma, my chest heaving with conflicting waves of shock, betrayal, and unquenchable grief.
“Emma,” I whispered. “Is that Gabriel’s son?”
Emma sank to her knees beside the altar steps, her slender shoulders shaking with the weight of four years of buried agony. “Yes, Damien. His name is Leo Gabriel Blackwood. He is your nephew.”
“Why did you hide him from me?” The pain in my voice was raw, stripped of all Don arrogance. “Gabriel was my brother! I would have given my life for him! Why did you let me believe he died without leaving a single trace?”
“Because Gabriel begged me with his dying breath to keep Leo away from you!” Emma cried out, looking up at me with tears streaming down her pale cheeks. “Four years ago, Gabriel and I were married in secret in a small chapel in Galena. When Gabriel discovered that Vanessa’s father, Senator Sterling, was laundering Mexican cartel money through our family’s port contracts, he threatened to go to the federal prosecutor. Vanessa invited him to dinner at the lake house… and poisoned his wine with *Tetrodotoxin-8*!”
My blood froze. Gabriel’s death had been ruled an accidental fire aboard his yacht, but the coroner’s toxicology report had mysteriously vanished from the county archives.
“Gabriel managed to crawl back to our cottage before his heart stopped,” Emma wept, clutching her hands against her heart. “He gave me our four-month-old baby, gave me his encrypted cipher journal, and told me: *‘Run, Emma. Vanessa has bought the police, the judges, and three capos inside Damien’s inner circle. If you tell Damien now, Vanessa will assassinate him before he can mobilize. Hide Leo until you have the evidence to bury them all.’*”
She swallowed hard, her voice breaking into a ragged whisper. “I took a vow of silence. I gave Leo to Mother Teresa’s Convent under an assumed name. I took the job as your housekeeper so I could monitor Vanessa’s movements whenever she visited your mansion. For three years, I never uttered a word, enduring every humiliation, so that one day I could save your life and give Gabriel’s son his rightful name!”
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Dominic stepped forward, holding the silver stiletto he had bagged from the floor with an electronic field scanner. The screen glowed bright red.
“Boss,” Dominic’s voice shook with suppressed fury. “The residue on this blade is Tetrodotoxin-8. The exact same poison that killed your brother.”
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