Chapter 4 - THE BLOODLINE
By nightfall, Moretti Manor was transformed into an impenetrable fortress.
Fifty of my most trusted capos, men whose loyalty to my father and me had been forged over three decades, stood guard along every perimeter wall. Tactical spotlights swept the manicured lawns. Snipers took positions on the slate roof. Anyone attempting to approach the gates without my personal biometric clearance would be turned into mist before they reached the driveway.
In the second-floor master suite, the scene was entirely different.
The suite had been stripped of its mourning gloom. Elena had bathed the four boys and dressed them in oversized gray cashmere sweaters that had once belonged to me as a boy, the sleeves rolled up several times over their tiny wrists.
They sat together on the enormous king-sized bed, their legs swinging over the edge, eating warm chicken soup from silver bowls.
Dr. Harrison, the family physician who had tended to the Morettis since I was a teenager, walked over to me near the fireplace, holding a white medical folder. His hands, usually as steady as a surgeon's scalpel, were shaking.
“The rapid DNA swabs are conclusive, Alejandro,” Harrison whispered, his voice hushed so the boys wouldn't hear. “A ninety-nine-point-nine-eight percent match. There is no biological doubt. They are your sons. Sofia’s sons. Quadruplets.”
I closed the folder, staring into the flames dancing in the hearth. “Their health?”
“Remarkably robust,” Harrison replied, smiling faintly through his exhaustion. “Elena raised them well. Good lungs, strong bones, clear eyes. A little underweight from being on the run the last three days, but nothing that a month of proper nutrition won't fix.”
Harrison placed a hand on my shoulder. “Alejandro... what are you going to do? The five families are already whispering. News of the shootout at the manor has reached every precinct in Cook County.”
“Let them whisper,” I said, turning away from the fire. “Dominic is still out there. And Viktor Petrov has made the biggest mistake of his miserable life.”
I walked over to the bed.
As soon as my boots touched the hardwood, Dante and Leo scrambled toward me across the silk duvet. They didn't show an ounce of fear. To them, after five years of listening to Elena’s bedtime stories about their mythical father who ruled a shining kingdom by the lake, I wasn't a ruthless mobster.
I was a king. I was their protector.
“Papa!” Leo exclaimed, holding up an antique gold pocket watch he had found on the nightstand. “It ticks! Listen!”
He held the watch up to my ear. I leaned down, listening to the steady, rhythmic *tick-tick-tick* of the mechanism my grandfather had carried through the trenches of World War II.
“Do you like it?” I asked quietly, sitting on the edge of the mattress.
Leo nodded eagerly, his big brown eyes shining. “It’s shiny. Like your buttons.”
“Then it’s yours,” I said, closing his little fingers over the gold casing. “Keep it in your pocket. Whenever you hear it ticking, you remember that as long as I am breathing, nothing in this world can touch you.”
Mateo crawled into my lap without asking permission. He laid his small, tired head against my chest, right above where my shoulder holster rested. His tiny fingers curled into the fabric of my black shirt.
“Elena said you had to fight the bad men,” Mateo murmured, his voice slurring with exhaustion. “Did you make them go away forever?”
I wrapped my arms around the boy. He felt so light, so fragile. A stray bullet, a piece of shrapnel—any of the horrors that defined my daily existence could have extinguished this fragile spark in an instant.
“Not yet, little bird,” I whispered, using Elena’s phrase. “But I will. Very soon.”
Nico yawned, rubbing his eyes, and collapsed against my side, his cheek resting on my knee. Within ten minutes, all four of them were fast asleep, tangled together like a litter of wolves in the center of the bed.
Elena stood in the doorway, a soft, sorrowful smile on her face. “Sofia would be proud of you, Alejandro.”
“Sofia was a fool to keep them from me,” I replied, my voice tightening with lingering grief. “I could have protected her. I could have ended Dominic five years ago.”
“You would have burned the city to the ground, Alejandro,” Elena countered softly, stepping into the room to pull the heavy down duvet over the sleeping boys. “And in that fire, who knows what would have survived? Look at them. They grew up running through meadows, playing with dogs, catching fireflies. They didn't grow up behind bulletproof glass and armored motorcades. She gave them four years of peace.”
Elena looked at me, her eyes piercing through my armor. “Now, it is your turn to give them the rest of their lives.”
Before I could answer, my encrypted satellite phone vibrated violently against my hip.
I stepped out onto the marble balcony overlooking the dark lake, sliding the screen to answer.
“Speak,” I said.
“Boss,” came the deep, gravelly voice of Carlo, my captain in charge of the South Side docks. “We caught one of Dominic’s couriers trying to clear out a safehouse in Cicero. He was carrying twenty passports, two hundred thousand in bearer bonds, and a flight manifest.”
“Where is he going?”
“He’s not flying out of O’Hare,” Carlo replied, his breathing heavy over the line. “He’s meeting Viktor Petrov tonight at midnight at the abandoned grain silos down by the Calumet River. Petrov has a cargo ship ready to move him out of the country.”
I looked at the glowing green numbers on my watch.
It was 10:45 PM.
“Gather forty men,” I ordered, my voice dropping into the icy register that signaled an execution. “Full tactical gear. Bring the heavy armor. Block every road leading into the Calumet industrial basin.”
“Are we taking them prisoner, Boss?” Carlo asked.
I looked back through the balcony glass at the bed where my four sons lay sleeping in safety.
May you like
“No,” I said. “Tonight, there are no prisoners.”
***
