Chapter 6 - the ghost in the drawer
The name hung in the air like a detonation.
*Romano.*
The bloodline that had once ruled the entire American underworld from coast to coast. The family that had built the very empire Adrian now controlled. The dynasty that had supposedly been eradicated ten years ago during the Great Purge, leaving only scorched earth and whispers behind.
Adrian took the silver ring from her outstretched hand. His fingers, usually so steady on the trigger of a weapon, trembled as he brought the metal into the dim red light.
He traced the wolf. He traced the three stars. The silver was authentic, worn smooth by decades of wear on a man’s hand.
Adrian looked up at her, the confusion and shock on his face giving way to an overwhelming, haunting realization. "Gabriel’s daughter. You were fourteen when they hit the lake house. They said everyone inside burned."
"My mother dragged me through the storm drainage into the woods," Melissa said, her voice tight with unshed tears. "We changed our names. We hid in plain sight. We took nothing with us. When my mother got sick, the only way I could save her life was to come back into this world. I chose you, Adrian. Out of every syndicate in the country, I chose to carry your child."
Adrian didn't say a word. He spun his chair around to his heavy desk.
With rapid, deliberate movements, he pulled a small bronze key from a compartment hidden inside his wristwatch band. He reached under the desk, unlocked a false drawer beneath the knee-hole, and pulled out a velvet-lined wooden box.
Inside was a faded, thirty-year-old photograph.
Melissa stepped closer, Matteo resting against her shoulder, and looked down.
The photograph showed a twenty-year-old Adrian Moretti, young, hungry, and unscarred, standing at attention behind a towering, aristocratic man with slicked-back grey hair, a razor-sharp suit, and the piercing, regal eyes of a king.
It was Don Gabriel Romano.
And on Gabriel’s left hand, clearly visible in the photograph, was the exact twin of the silver ring Adrian was currently holding.
Melissa gasped, her hand flying to her mouth. "You... you were with my father?"
Adrian stared at the photograph, his voice dropping into a register of profound reverence and grief. "Gabriel took me off the streets of South Boston when I was nineteen years old. I was an orphan with blood on my hands and no future. He didn't treat me like muscle. He taught me how to read ledgers. He taught me honor. He built me into the man I am today."
He closed his hand around the silver ring, his knuckles white.
"The night Gabriel was murdered, I was in Miami brokering a trade deal," Adrian continued, his voice trembling with a rare, terrifying fury. "By the time I flew back, the compound was ashes. I spent five years hunting down the men who gave the order. I built the Moretti syndicate on the bones of your father’s enemies, Melissa. Everything I own—this house, this territory, this army—was built to avenge Gabriel Romano."
He raised his eyes to meet hers, his pale gaze burning with raw emotion. "And all this time, his true heir was sleeping in my bed."
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Before Melissa could speak, the heavy oak doors of the library splintered with the violent crack of a battering ram.
Heavy tactical boots marched across the shattered wood.
