Chapter 2 - The Alliance of ShadowsInstead of calling his guards to drag me down to the basement cells, Vincent Moretti did something far more terrifying.
He locked the office door himself, walked back to his desk, poured two fingers of amber liquid into a heavy crystal glass, and slid it toward the edge of the mahogany.
"Sit down, Grace," he commanded, gesturing to the leather armchair opposite his desk.
"I'd rather stand," I replied stiffly, keeping my hands clenched at my sides.
Vincent let out a short, cold breath that sounded almost like a laugh. "Stubborn. Just like her. Sit down before my patience runs out and I decide to test whether you're as resilient as you pretend to be."
Swallowing the lump of fear stuck in my throat, I walked over and sank into the edge of the leather chair. The cushions were so soft they felt mocking against the raw panic tearing through my chest.
"Seven years ago," Vincent began, swirling the whiskey in his glass without drinking it, "I wasn't the head of this family. My uncle was. He ran the syndicates with a brutality that even I found repulsive. Around that time, a young woman—a bright, stubborn architecture student trying to pay off her family's debts—got tangled up in our commercial real estate laundering fronts. Her name was Elena Vance."
My breath caught. Vance. That was our family name before our father changed it out of shame after she disappeared.
"She found out what the firm was doing," Vincent continued, his dark eyes fixed on the amber liquid in his glass. "She threatened to go to the federal prosecutors with ledger books she had secretly copied. My uncle ordered her erased to protect the family's assets. I tried to stop him. I tried to cut a deal to get her out of the city safely, under a new identity." He looked up, his gaze locking directly onto mine with unflinching weight. "On the night she was supposed to vanish and start over... her car went off the George Washington Bridge. No body was ever recovered. The official police report called it a tragic accident."
"An accident?" My voice rose, cracking with furious disbelief. "You expect me to believe that after seeing her ring in a pool of fresh blood in your office tonight? Who was bleeding on that floor, Mr. Moretti? Whose blood was I forced to clean up before sunrise?"
"My uncle's," Vincent said flatly.
The words hung in the air like smoke.
"He tried to execute a coup tonight," Vincent explained, his tone dropping into a lethal register. "He thought I was growing too soft, too modern in how I managed our business interests. He brought in outside enforcers to take my seat. We settled the dispute... permanently. But when my men cleared the room, that ring was left behind where he dropped it during the struggle. Which means my uncle had it all along. Which means... he lied to me seven years ago about letting her go."
The world seemed to spin on its axis. All my life, I had blamed myself for not being older, not being stronger, not protecting Elena when she needed me. I had watched my mother waste away into a ghost of her former self, and my little brother grow up carrying the invisible anchor of abandonment. And all the while, the monster sitting across from me had held the key to the nightmare.
"You lied to her," I whispered, tears spilling over my lashes, hot and burning. "You let her walk into a trap."
"I did," Vincent admitted without a single word of defense, surprising me with his brutal, unvarnished honesty. He didn't offer excuses or try to soften the blow. "And I've lived with the blood on my hands ever since. But you listen to me very carefully, Grace: if you want to know the truth about what happened to your sister—if you want to find out whether she's buried in a shallow grave or hidden behind someone else's lies—you aren't going to get it by crying in the servants' quarters."
He leaned across the desk, closing the distance between us.
"My enemies know about the ring now," Vincent continued in a razor-sharp whisper. "They know someone was in this room cleaning up after the hit. If they figure out it was you—if they realize you have a personal vendetta against the Moretti family—they won't wait for sunrise to eliminate you and your little brother."
"My brother..." The name slipped out before I could stop it, a gasp of pure terror. Leo. My thirteen-year-old brother, who relied on my salary to pay for his asthma medication and school tuition.
"Yes, your brother," Vincent said smoothly, pulling a small, secure burner phone from his jacket pocket and sliding it across the desk toward me. "Right now, my men have relocated him to a secure safehouse in upstate New York. He is safe. But his safety—and your survival—depends entirely on your next move."
I stared at the black phone on the desk.
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"What do you want from me?" I asked, my voice trembling.
"A partnership," Vincent replied, his dark eyes gleaming with dangerous ambition. "You want answers about Elena. I want to clean out the remaining traitors inside my own syndicate who helped my uncle cover up his mistakes. You stay here, playing the obedient, invisible maid. But you keep your eyes open, your mouth shut, and you feed me every whisper you hear in the halls of this house. Do we have a deal, Grace?"
