Chapter 5
Joseph tried to leave the bed.
His injured leg collapsed beneath him.
Vincent caught him.
“Let me go.”
“You can’t stand.”
“Kane has the ledger.”
“And he wants you chasing him while Moretti attacks this clinic.”
Joseph stopped fighting.
Vincent called the guards.
One did not answer.
Then the emergency lights flashed.
Teresa locked the door.
Nicholas moved toward the window.
Three black vehicles had entered the alley.
“Moretti found us.”
My mother grabbed my hand.
“There’s another exit.”
“How do you know?”
“I helped choose this clinic twenty-one years ago.”
She pushed aside a cabinet.
Behind it was a narrow door leading to the room where Joseph had nearly died on the night I was born.
The clinic had been renovated, but the emergency tunnel remained.
Doctors placed Joseph in a wheelchair.
We moved toward the basement.
Men shouted upstairs.
A guard fired two warning shots.
The stairwell door slammed behind us.
In the tunnel, Joseph called Kane repeatedly.
No answer.
Then my phone rang.
The number was hidden.
I answered.
Kane’s voice came through.
“I did not betray you.”
“You stole the memory card.”
“I took it before Moretti could.”
“You could have told us.”
“Vincent would have killed me before I explained.”
Vincent heard him.
“Give me a location. We can test that theory.”
Kane ignored him.
“Audrey, the card contains a list of everyone Moretti controls. That includes federal agents. If I hand it to the wrong person, your mother’s evidence disappears again.”
“Then give it back to me.”
“I can’t.”
“It was hidden in my music box.”
“It is evidence in a criminal investigation.”
“An investigation you buried for twenty years?”
Kane went silent.
Mom took the phone.
“You promised me Audrey would never enter this world.”
“I kept her safe as long as I could.”
“No. You kept Joseph blind.”
“Because you asked me to.”
“I asked you to protect my child. I didn’t ask you to protect Moretti.”
“I need forty-eight hours.”
“We don’t have forty-eight minutes.”
Gunfire sounded behind us.
Kane heard it.
“Where are you?”
Mom ended the call.
The tunnel opened into an underground parking area two blocks away.
Teresa had another vehicle waiting.
As we climbed inside, Nicholas stopped.
“My daughter is still with Moretti.”
“If you leave now, you’ll be captured again,” Vincent said.
“I can’t keep running while Mia is trapped.”
I understood him.
Every person around me had spent years choosing strategy over family.
It had destroyed them.
“We find Mia,” I said.
Joseph looked at me.
“You are not giving orders.”
“Then stay in the van.”
Something almost like pride appeared in his eyes.
It vanished quickly.
Nicholas knew of a Moretti safe house in Cicero.
Mia might be there.
Vincent sent men to watch the building.
Within twenty minutes, they confirmed a young woman was inside.
But Moretti’s son, Anthony, guarded her with six armed men.
“We call the police,” I said.
Vincent shook his head.
“Moretti owns the local captain.”
“Then call someone else.”
“People like Moretti survive by making sure every official has a price.”
Joseph looked at me.
“This is why Rose kept you away.”
“And yet here I am.”
I turned to Nicholas.
“Would Mia trust you if she heard your voice?”
“Yes.”
“Can you call her?”
“They took her phone.”
“Does she have social media?”
Vincent understood.
Moretti’s guards monitored her phone, but they might not monitor public comments from an unknown account.
We found a photograph Mia had posted months earlier.
Nicholas wrote a comment using a childhood phrase only she would recognize.
Look for the blue bird.
Mia had escaped her bedroom as a child by climbing onto a roof decorated with a blue metal bird.
At the Cicero house, a blue weather vane stood above the garage.
Vincent’s men watched.
Ten minutes later, an upstairs window opened.
Mia climbed onto the roof.
A guard saw her.
He shouted.
She ran across the shingles.
Nicholas jumped from the van before anyone could stop him.
He crossed the street and climbed a drainpipe.
Moretti’s men rushed outside.
Vincent’s team blocked them without firing.
Police sirens approached.
Someone had made an anonymous call about a domestic disturbance.
Nicholas caught Mia as she slid from the roof.
She threw her arms around him.
“Dad.”
He held her against his chest.
For the first time, the false brother from Moretti’s video became a frightened father.
The police arrived.
Mia immediately told officers she had been kidnapped.
The guards were arrested.
Anthony Moretti escaped through the rear alley.
Mia revealed that her captors spoke about moving someone called the witness to a lake house.
“The witness is Kane,” Mom said.
Joseph shook his head.
“No. Moretti doesn’t call Kane the witness.”
“Then who?”
Mia looked at my mother.
“They said she was a woman who saw Marco killed.”
Teresa sat down heavily.
Everyone looked at her.
Her hands began trembling.
“My son,” she whispered.
“Gabriel saw Marco die.”
Joseph stared at her.
“You told us Gabriel died before Marco disappeared.”
“I lied.”
“Is Gabriel alive?” Vincent demanded.
Teresa began crying.
Gabriel had survived the attack that supposedly killed him.
Moretti hid him in exchange for Teresa’s silence.
For twenty-one years, she received one photograph every birthday proving her son was alive.
If she told Joseph, Moretti promised Gabriel would die.
“Where is the lake house?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
Joseph’s face turned cold.
“You worked in my home all these years.”
“I protected my child.”
“You watched me search for Marco. You watched Rose disappear. You knew Moretti was controlling us.”
“I was his prisoner too.”
My mother stepped between them.
“Do not punish a mother for making the same choice I made.”
Joseph looked at both women.
“You all decided I was too dangerous to know the truth.”
“You were,” Teresa said.
The answer struck him.
He rolled his wheelchair back.
For once, Joseph Salvini had no command to give.
Mia remembered hearing Anthony mention White Birch Lake.
Nicholas knew a Moretti property there.
It was registered under a shell corporation.
Before we could move, every phone in the vehicle received an emergency alert.
Police were searching for Joseph Salvini in connection with my kidnapping and the shooting at the Golden Crown.
A second alert named Rose Bennett as an accomplice.
Kane had not protected us.
He had made us fugitives.
Vincent told the driver to avoid highways.
Joseph called a number from memory.
A federal prosecutor named Elena Walsh answered.
He offered her the entire Salvini organization in exchange for safe passage for Mom and me.
Everyone stared at him.
Vincent looked betrayed.
“You would surrender everything?”
Joseph watched me.
“It was never worth what it cost.”
The prosecutor agreed to meet at a church on the South Side.
We arrived before sunset.
Elena came alone.
She was Joseph’s older sister.
I had another relative I had never known existed.
She looked at me for a long time.
Then she slapped Joseph.
“That was for letting me believe Rose’s baby died.”
Joseph accepted it.
Elena hugged my mother.
Then she held my face between her hands.
“You look like both of them.”
“Can you help us?”
“Yes.”
She produced federal protection documents.
But before anyone signed, church bells rang.
It was not the hour.
The ringing was a warning.
Elena moved toward the side door.
A red dot appeared on her coat.
Joseph knocked her down.
The window shattered.
People screamed.
Vincent pulled us behind the altar.
A voice came through the church speakers.
Victor Moretti.
“Bring me the memory card and Joseph’s daughter.”
Mom gripped my hand.
“He doesn’t know Kane took it.”
“He knows,” Elena said.
Her phone displayed a live video.
Kane was tied to a chair beside White Birch Lake.
Moretti stood behind him holding the missing memory card.
“Joseph,” Moretti said into the camera, “you have until midnight to choose.”
The view widened.
Gabriel sat in a second chair.
Beside him was my best friend, Kayla.
She had been missing since I called her from the restaurant.
I covered my mouth.
Moretti smiled.
“One witness. One innocent girl. One old friend.”
May you like
Then he looked directly into the camera.
“Come alone, Audrey, or they all die believing you were too afraid to save them.”
