Chapter 7 - THE SCRATCHED INITIALS ON THE GOLD BACK
Daniel pushed himself off the marble pillar so fast his heel caught the hem of the floral arrangement, sending a crystal vase crashing to the floor.
Water and white roses spilled across the stone.
"She was delirious!" Daniel shouted, his voice cracking high and thin as he backed toward the heavy oak altar doors. "Your daughter was dying on an operating table, Luca! You're going to believe a lunatic story about a scratched watch?"
Luca didn't stand up right away.
He knelt on the marble beside Grace, his thumb tracing the three jagged letters—D. R. V.—carved into the soot-blackened gold casing of Victor Russo’s watch.
When Luca finally rose to his feet, the grief in his eyes had crystallized into something so cold and terrifying that even I took a step back behind the wedding chairs.
"Daniel Robert Vance," Luca said softly. "Your mother took her second husband's name when you were ten. Before that, you were a Russo. You worked at your Uncle Victor's south dock warehouse the winter it burned down."
"I was nineteen!" Daniel yelled, his hand fumbling behind his back for the brass handle of the locked altar door. "The insurance investigators ruled it an electrical fault in the main office!"
"Wait," Selena whispered.
She had stopped crying. She was staring at her nephew from across the aisle, her face slack with a creeping, sickening realization. Slowly, she looked down at the red silk gown Luca had bought her, then up at the young man she had risked everything to protect.
"Daniel..." Selena breathed, taking a tentative step toward him. "Victor told me you were in Indianapolis picking up a freight manifest the night of the fire. The night you called me from the highway crying that the warehouse was burning."
"Aunt Selena, don't listen to them," Daniel pleaded, sweat beading along his blond hairline.
"No," Selena said, her voice shaking as the pieces of the last four years clicked together in her head. "Three weeks before the fire... Victor found out someone was skimming forty thousand a month from the customs containers. He told me at dinner he was going to audit the young guys on the night shift and hand the thief over to the federal prosecutor himself. I thought he meant one of the dockworkers."
She looked at the gold watch in Luca's hand, and her knees trembled.
"It was you," Selena whispered, horrified. "You were stealing from Victor. And when he caught you at the warehouse that night, you locked him in the office and set the building on fire!"
"He was going to send me to federal prison for ten years!" Daniel screamed, dropping all pretense as panic overtook him. "My own uncle! Over forty grand! He didn't care about our family! He was already planning to divorce you, Selena! Why do you think he didn't die inside the building? Because he crawled out the back drainage pipe and ran straight to Clara Moretti's car instead of calling an ambulance—and died in a motel room outside Boston two days later from smoke inhalation because he was too scared Luca would finish him off in a hospital!"
Selena pressed both hands over her mouth, a violent sob wrenching through her chest.
For four years, she had believed her husband died loving her, and she had wormed her way into Luca Moretti's life out of a twisted mixture of loneliness, greed, and quiet resentment toward the Moretti family she blamed for the dock wars. And the entire time, the nephew she had stolen for, lied for, and destroyed Grace's life to save had been the monster who murdered her husband.
"And this morning," Grace said, rising slowly to her feet with my help, her eyes burning into Daniel, "when you searched my glove box outside the church and found Leo's birth certificate... you didn't just see leverage to force Lily down the aisle."
"You realized Victor Russo had a legitimate son," Luca finished, taking a slow, predatory step toward Daniel. "Which meant the entire Russo shipping trust—the properties Selena inherited as his widow that you've been draining dry with power of attorney—legally belongs to my four-year-old grandson."
Daniel's eyes darted wildly around the room. He was trapped. The altar doors behind him were locked by Marco from the outside; the main doors at the back were bolted.
Suddenly, Daniel didn't reach for the door anymore.
Before Luca could cross the ten feet between them, Daniel lunged sideways and grabbed the person closest to him around the throat.
Lily.
She cried out as Daniel dragged her backward in her heavy ivory gown, knocking over the unity candle stand. From inside his tuxedo waistband, Daniel pulled a small, flat black pistol he had concealed under his cummerbund and pressed the barrel directly beneath Lily's chin.
"Stop right there!" Daniel shrieked, his arm locked around Lily's collarbone while she gasped, her hands clawing at his tuxedo sleeve. "Take one more step, Luca, and I swear to God I'll paint these white chairs with her blood!"
Luca halted instantly, his hands coming up slightly at his sides. "Daniel. Think about what you're doing. There are twenty armed men outside those doors."
"They won't shoot me if I'm holding your only living daughter!" Daniel panted, his eyes bloodshot and erratic as he dragged Lily back toward the side service door—the one that led through the pantry to the underground garage where the delivery vans parked. "And don't think those four cars you sent to Pilsen are going to save that brat in the apartment, either!"
My blood froze in my veins. "What did you just say?"
Daniel laughed maniacally, sweat dripping off his chin onto Lily's bare shoulder. "Who do you think I called twenty minutes ago when I heard the maid's mother on the phone? My guy in the black SUV outside your mother's building wasn't waiting by himself! My warehouse foreman went up the back fire escape five minutes ago while your stupid mother was locking herself in the front bathroom!"
Grace let out a strangled cry, clutching Luca's arm so hard her nails drew blood through his shirt cuff.
"If I don't walk out of this garage in five minutes and call my foreman off," Daniel yelled, kicking the side service door open with his heel while keeping the gun jammed against Lily's jaw, "he's going to break that bathroom window from the alley and throw that four-year-old kid down three flights of iron stairs! Now throw me the keys to your armored Escalade, Luca—right now!"
Luca reached slowly into his pocket for his keys.
Wait.
My eyes dropped to the small cell phone still lying face-up on the white wedding chair beside me—where the speaker call with my mother was still connected and silent.
And suddenly, over the tiny phone speaker, I didn't hear crying anymore.
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I heard the heavy metallic clatter of a cast-iron skillet hitting someone right across the face, followed by a deep, booming voice that belonged to the retired Chicago police sergeant who lived across the hall from my mother:
"Get your hands behind your back, you son of a bitch, before I let this seventy-year-old woman hit you with the frying pan again!"
