The photograph on the security monitor destroyed the last certainty I had left.
My mother stood in that hospital room, alive, holding newborn Lily as though she had never vanished beneath a coffin twenty years earlier.
**ADRIAN IS NEXT.**
Those three words burned across the wall behind her.
I tightened my grip around Matteo’s body while blood soaked through my shirt.
“Elena,” I ordered, “call the surgeon downstairs.”
My mansion had a private medical room for emergencies no hospital could be trusted to report. Elena carried Lily away as my remaining guards placed Matteo on a stretcher.
Lily screamed for him.
“Daddy! Don’t go!”
Matteo forced his eyes open.
“I’m not going anywhere, little star.”
It was a promise neither of us knew he could keep.
Across the monitors, Vincent smiled beside my father.
“You have ten minutes to decide,” he said. “Bring Matteo’s drive to the old Romano opera house, or you will never learn what happened to your mother.”
The feed went black.
I looked at the waterproof drive in my hand.
Vincent had known about it.
That meant someone near us was still transmitting information.
I turned toward the surviving guards.
“Phones on the floor.”
No one argued.
Weapons, watches, radios, and phones were placed on the marble. I ordered the mansion’s signal network disabled.
Then Elena stepped from the hallway.
“Lily is with the doctor.”
“You should stay with her.”
“So should you.”
Her courage irritated me because she was right.
“I cannot protect her without knowing what Vincent wants.”
“He wants that drive.”
“No. He wants me angry enough to deliver it.”
Elena’s expression hardened.
“Then don’t.”
I studied her.
Three months earlier, she had entered my home with trembling hands and a forged name. Now she stood in the ruins of my hall, arguing with the most feared man in Chicago.
Matteo had loved her for a reason.
The surgeon emerged twenty minutes later.
“The bullet missed the heart,” he said. “But your brother has lost too much blood. He needs surgery immediately.”
“Do it.”
“There’s another problem.”
He held up a blood bag.
“His blood type is rare. We have only one compatible unit.”
“My blood?”
The surgeon shook his head.
“Elena’s records say she is compatible.”
Elena froze.
I looked at her.
“How?”
She said nothing.
The surgeon glanced between us. “Is there something I should know?”
Elena’s face turned pale.
“Take whatever he needs.”
While the surgeon prepared her, I connected Matteo’s drive to an isolated computer.
Most files were encrypted.
One opened automatically.
A video appeared.
My mother sat in a plain room, older but unmistakably alive.
“Adrian,” she began, “if you are seeing this, then Matteo found the courage I lost.”
My knees nearly failed beneath me.
