Chapter 7 - ROOM 304 AT ST. JUDE’S
“Don’t hang up,” Luca said instantly, reaching across the pickup cab to tap the speaker button on my phone.
“Ma’am,” I said, forcing my voice not to shake while my chest felt like it was caving in, “did my dad sign a transfer release?”
“Well, Mr. Moretti showed us a durable healthcare power of attorney signed by Arthur Bellini’s legal clinic,” the nurse said, sounding flustered. “Since the Bellini Foundation subsidizes this wing, the night supervisor approved it. They’re packing your father’s room on the third floor right now.”
I looked at Vanessa in the dim light of the truck cab.
Her eyes were wide with horror and self-disgust.
“My father’s foundation,” she whispered. “When I hired you ten months ago, Emma, your application listed St. Jude’s on your wage-garnishment waiver. That’s why your file was in the household ledger Corrado took from the mansion tonight.”
Because I had refused to put Sal in a cab three hours ago, my sixty-two-year-old father—who couldn’t walk fifty feet without a hemi-walker—was being rolled out of his room by two men who had already killed Matteo Moretti.
“Nurse,” I said quickly, “tell them my father gets severe vertigo if he’s moved before his midnight blood-pressure pill takes effect. Tell them twenty minutes—just hold the elevator for twenty minutes.”
“I’ll try, Emma, but they’re already at the nurse’s station—”
The line clicked dead.
Tears burned hot behind my eyes, and I hated myself for them.
“Mr. Moretti,” I whispered to Luca, my hands trembling around the phone. “He’s all I have left.”
Luca didn’t offer empty rich-man promises.
He reached over the seat, gently lifted sleeping Leo out of my arms, and placed the boy securely into Elena’s lap.
Then he looked me dead in the eye.
“Your father is sleeping in his own bed tonight, Emma,” Luca said. “I don’t care if I have to tear half of Chicago down brick by brick.”
Sal was already pulling the F-150 out from beneath the overpass, the engine roaring as he merged onto the Kennedy Expressway without waiting for a gap in traffic.
“We can’t walk through the front lobby of St. Jude’s,” Sal said, checking his mirrors as we hit seventy miles an hour in the rain. “Corrado will have a man watching the circular driveway.”
“Wait,” Vanessa said from the back seat, wiping her cheeks roughly with the back of her wrist. “They won’t be watching me if they think I turned on you.”
Luca glanced back at her sharply. “Absolutely not.”
“Listen to me!” Vanessa snapped, and for the first time, the steel in her voice wasn’t spoiled arrogance—it was pure resolve. “My father still thinks I ran out of West Addison because I was panicked about my secret coming out! He doesn’t know we found Matteo’s watch with his signature in it. If I walk into that third-floor hallway barefoot in this dress crying for my father, Arthur and Corrado will step out of your dad’s room to grab me.”
“And what then?” Luca asked coldly. “Corrado is desperate, Vanessa. If he suspects you know—”
“He won’t,” she said, pulling her diamond engagement ring off her finger and pressing it into Luca’s hand. “Because I’m going to tell my father you threw me out of the car when you found out about Leo. While I draw them toward the main elevators, you, Sal, and Emma bring her father down the service freight elevator at the back of the physical therapy gym.”
I stared at her—this woman in a ruined couture dress with muddy bare feet who had started the night calling me a stupid little maid.
“Why are you doing this for my dad?” I asked quietly.
Vanessa looked at Leo sleeping peacefully against Elena’s floral cardigan, his red wool mitten still tucked beneath his chin.
“Because for four years I thought keeping secrets in the dark was the only way to protect someone in this family,” Vanessa said softly. “And tonight a housekeeper making twenty-two dollars an hour showed me what actual courage looks like.”
Twelve minutes later, Sal backed the pickup up to the dark loading dock behind St. Jude’s Rehabilitation Center, leaving Elena in the locked cab with Leo and Tony’s heavy iron tire wrench across her knees.
I knew the back corridors by heart from visiting my dad after my late shifts.
I swiped my visitor badge at the laundry door, leading Luca and Sal up the concrete fire stairs three steps at a time while Vanessa slipped through the main glass entrance downstairs.
When we cracked open the third-floor stairwell door near the therapy gym, the hallway smelled of antiseptic and rain.
Down by the main nurse’s station, Arthur Bellini and Corrado Moretti stood flanking two burly private orderlies who were wheeling my father’s stretcher into the corridor.
My dad looked so small under the white sheet, his good left hand gripping the aluminum rail of the gurney, his eyes darting around in confusion.
“Where is Emma?” my dad was asking, his speech slightly slurred from his stroke. “Emma always calls before they change my room.”
“She’s meeting us at the new clinic, Mr. Reed,” Corrado lied smoothly, adjusting his gold-rimmed reading glasses.
Right then, the main passenger elevator chimed at the far end of the hall.
Vanessa stumbled out, her dark hair plastered to her cheeks, sobbing loudly enough to make every nurse turn around.
“Daddy!” Vanessa cried out, holding up her bare left hand. “Luca left me on the highway! He took the boy and threw my ring at me!”
Arthur Bellini’s face purpled with rage as he strode fifty feet down the hall toward his daughter, and Corrado signaled one of his men to follow him, leaving only a single orderly beside my father’s stretcher outside the freight alcove.
Luca moved like a shadow.
Before the remaining man could turn around, Luca stepped out of the stairwell, clamped a hand over the man’s mouth, and dragged him backward into the empty linen closet, locking the heavy metal latch from the outside.
Sal and I sprinted ten feet into the hall, released the brake on my father’s gurney, and rolled him straight into the waiting freight elevator behind the nurse’s station.
“Emma?” my dad gasped, grabbing my wrist with his good hand as the heavy steel doors slid shut. “What’s going on, sweetheart?”
“Everything’s okay, Dad,” I breathed, kissing his forehead while Sal keyed the manual override switch to lock the elevator on the basement level. “Mr. Moretti and Sal are taking you somewhere safe.”
Only when I looked up as the doors closed, my stomach dropped.
Luca hadn’t stepped into the freight elevator with us.
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Through the narrow wire-glass window in the door, I saw Luca walking calmly down the third-floor hallway toward Arthur Bellini and Uncle Corrado—alone, unarmed, holding Matteo’s cracked gold pocket watch out in his open palm.
And behind Corrado’s back, the second bodyguard was reaching inside his coat.
