Chapter 1 - The Sudden Descent
The oxygen masks dangled above us like translucent ghosts, swaying violently as the Boeing 777 dropped another fifty feet into a pocket of freezing air. Screams echoed through the main cabin behind the velvet curtain, but inside the first-class suite, the air was suffocatingly still.
My eyes remained locked on the woman across the aisle.
The pale skin. The dark hair falling over her trembling shoulders. The exact shade of hazel eyes that had haunted my sleep for two thousand, one hundred, and ninety-two days.
"Sarah," I spat out, the name tasting like ash and iron on my tongue.
The plane jolted again, hard enough to rattle the crystal glassware in the galley, but I felt utterly paralyzed. The little girl—Lila—was still holding my hand. Her tiny fingers were frozen around mine, trusting a stranger who held the dark keys to the city she was flying into.
"Luca... please," Sarah whispered, her voice barely carrying over the roar of the engines. Her hands were clenched so tightly in her lap that her knuckles had turned paper-white. "Not here. Don't do this here."
"Not here?" I echoed, my voice dropping to a dangerous whisper that cut through the engine noise. "You took six years of my life. You vanished from my apartment in Manhattan without a trace, leaving behind an empty closet and a broken lock. And now you sit across from me on a commercial flight and tell me not here?"
"You don't understand," she choked out, tears finally spilling over her lashes. "You never knew what was happening around you back then."
"I knew everything!" I snapped, though I kept my tone low enough that Lila wouldn't panic. "I tore New York apart looking for you. I put bounties on information. I nearly started a war with the Chicago families because I thought someone had taken you!"
"Nobody took me, Luca," Sarah said, looking down at her lap, unable to meet my eyes. "I ran."
The plane shuddered one final time as the pilot managed to pull us out of the violent airstream. The cabin lights flickered, stabilized, and cast a cold fluorescent glow across the aisle.
Beside me, Lila tugged gently on my sleeve. I slowly turned my head to look down at her.
She was staring between me and her mother, her small eyebrows drawn together in deep concentration. Then, her eyes darted to the drawing in her lap—the tall man in the black suit standing apart from the woman and the child—and back to my face.
"Mommy?" Lila asked, her voice small, innocent, and shattering. "Why are you crying? Is the secrets man mad at us?"
Sarah covered her mouth with a trembling hand, letting out a stifled sob. "No, baby. No. He's... he's not mad at you."
"Lila," I said, my voice softening instinctively, a bizarre sensation for a man who hadn't spoken softly to anyone in over half a decade. "Look at me."
She looked up, her dark eyes wide and unblinking.
"What did your mother tell you about your father?" I asked softly, though every nerve in my body was screaming for answers.
"She said he was strong," Lila whispered. "She said he had dark eyes like mine, and that he lived in a big city full of high buildings. But she said he was too dangerous to be around... that if we stayed, bad people would hurt us."
My eyes snapped back to Sarah. The piece of the puzzle slammed into place with the force of a freight train.
Bad people.
Six years ago, I wasn't just a real estate mogul; I was consolidating power over the five families of New York, wiping out rivals who threatened my empire. I had kept Sarah hidden in a glass penthouse, believing I was protecting her from the filth of my world. I thought I had built a fortress.
"You thought I couldn't protect you," I said to Sarah, the realization carving a hollow cavern into my chest.
"You couldn't, Luca!" Sarah flared up, her terror briefly replaced by a mother's fierce, protective rage. "I found the letter in your desk! I saw the photos! They had pictures of me at the grocery store, pictures of me through our bedroom window with red crosshairs drawn over my forehead! The note said if I didn't leave you, they wouldn't kill you—they'd wait until I had your child and kill us both in front of you!"
The air left my lungs.
"What letter?" I demanded, standing up from my seat despite the Fasten Seatbelt light still glowing overhead. "What photos, Sarah?!"
"Sir, please remain seated," a flight attendant urged nervously from the galley, but one look at my face made her step backward and pull the curtain shut.
"The letter from the Falcone family!" Sarah cried out quietly. "The one delivered three days before I left!"
"The Falcones never sent me a letter," I said, every drop of blood in my body turning to ice. "I executed the last Falcone captain seven years ago. They were wiped out before I ever met you."
Sarah froze. Her jaw slackened, the color draining completely from her cheeks. "What... what are you saying?"
"I'm saying someone lied to you," I said, stepping across the aisle and looming over her seat. "Someone wanted you gone. And you took my daughter and ran right into their trap."
The chime above us signaled our initial descent into John F. Kennedy International Airport. The city lights of New York appeared through the dark clouds below—a brilliant, sprawling grid of gold and white.
"We're landing," I said, pulling out my encrypted satellite phone from my jacket. I dialed three digits.
"Boss?" my head of security, Marco, answered on the first ring.
"Clear the private hangar at JFK," I ordered smoothly. "Have three armored Suburbans on the tarmac the second the wheels touch down. Cancel all my meetings for the next month."
"Is there a threat, Mr. Moretti?"
May you like
I looked down at Sarah, who was staring at me in sheer terror, and then at Lila, who was watching me with wide, fascinated eyes.
"No," I answered, my voice dropping into a register of iron and absolute authority. "I just found what was stolen from me six years ago. And nobody is taking them again."
