Chapter 3 - The Price of Returning
The return to the Moretti estate at three o'clock in the morning was conducted with the silence of a military operation.
The wrought-iron gates of the estate swung open without a sound, their hydraulic hinges oiled to perfection. As the Escalade pulled up the circular gravel driveway, two guards in dark suits stepped out from the shadows of the portico, their hands resting naturally near the lapels of their jackets. When they saw Santiago emerge from the driver’s seat, they snapped to attention.
Then Santiago opened the passenger door.
Julianna stepped out into the freezing drizzle. She was wearing her old wool coat, her hands shoved deep into her pockets. When the guards recognized the former maid, their eyes flickered with confusion, but a single, lethal glance from Santiago froze any questions before they could form.
"Tomas," Santiago called out as the front door swung open.
Tomas stood in the grand foyer, holding a set of brass keys. "Everything is prepared on the second floor, Boss. Mrs. Delaney cleared the west wing guest suite an hour ago. New linens, fresh stock, private bath."
"Is she awake?" Julianna asked, stepping past the threshold onto the polished checkerboard marble.
She didn't ask Santiago; she asked Tomas, her clinical instincts immediately overriding whatever deference she had once feigned as a servant.
Tomas blinked, glanced at Santiago, received a short nod, and replied, "She hasn't slept, ma'am. Mrs. Delaney checked on her twenty minutes ago. She’s sitting by the window."
Julianna didn't wait for permission. She discarded her wet coat, letting Tomas take it, and walked straight toward the grand staircase.
Santiago followed two steps behind her. He watched the way she moved—no longer with the hesitant, bowed posture of a domestic worker trying to blend into the baseboards, but with the brisk, authoritative stride of a clinician heading into an intensive care unit.
When they reached the second-floor landing, the silence was absolute.
Julianna stopped outside Sophia’s door. She took a slow, deep breath, rolling her shoulders back. Then she turned to Santiago.
"Stay here," she commanded softly.
Santiago’s eyebrows rose. "This is my house."
"And she is your patient right now," Julianna whispered, her eyes sharp. "She has spent forty-eight hours believing that the only connection she made in seven years resulted in that person being discarded by *you*. If you walk in there behind me like a warden returning an escaped prisoner, she will shut down permanently. Stay outside. Let me speak to her."
Santiago stood in the center of the hallway. For thirty-eight years, no one had given him orders under his own roof. Yet, looking into Julianna's determined, unyielding face, he found himself stepping back against the opposite wall.
"Five minutes," he conceded.
Julianna turned the brass handle and gently pushed the door open.
The room was dim, illuminated only by the pale amber glow of a streetlamp filtering through the heavy lace curtains. In the far corner, curled into an oversized armchair with her knees drawn tightly to her chest, sat Sophia. She was wearing an oversized flannel shirt, her dark hair tangled around her pale shoulders.
She didn't look up when the door opened. She had likely assumed it was Mrs. Delaney with another bowl of untouched soup.
Julianna did not make a sound with her feet. She walked across the rug until she was three feet away, then dropped to her knees, bringing herself down to Sophia’s eye level.
Slowly, Julianna raised both hands into the soft ambient light.
She signed: *I came back. The blue curtains are ugly. We are taking them down tomorrow.*
Sophia’s head jerked up.
Her dark eyes, ringed with red from two days of silent tears, widened in pure shock. Her mouth fell open. For a second, she looked as though she were seeing a ghost—some hallucination born of exhaustion and grief.
Julianna smiled. It was the same warm, mischievous smile Santiago had witnessed through the door three days earlier.
Julianna signed again: *I am not a ghost. And your brother is an idiot, but he has an expensive car.*
A tiny, strangled sound escaped Sophia’s throat—a gasp that dissolved instantly into a sob.
The nineteen-year-old girl threw herself out of the armchair and onto the carpet, wrapping her arms around Julianna’s neck with a ferocity that knocked them both back against the edge of the bed. Sophia’s entire body shook violently, her fingers digging into the wool of Julianna’s sweater, burying her face into Julianna’s shoulder.
Outside in the hall, Santiago stood motionless against the wall.
Through the cracked door, he heard the muffled, shuddering gasps of his sister. He saw the way Julianna held her—not with professional detachment, but with the fierce, protective tenderness of an older sister, rocking the trembling girl gently, her hand stroking Sophia's tangled hair.
"I'm here," Julianna whispered aloud in the room, her voice soft and steady as an anchor. "I'm not leaving, Sophia. I promise you. No one is sending me away again. We are going to finish what we started."
Santiago leaned his head back against the wood-paneled wall and closed his eyes. The knot that had been tightening inside his chest since Tuesday evening slowly, agonizingly began to unravel.
***
By nine o'clock the following morning, the second floor of the Moretti mansion had descended into controlled chaos.
Mrs. Delaney stood in the hallway with three maids, looking completely bewildered as two of Santiago’s armed bodyguards hauled out the heavy blue velvet draperies that had hung in Sophia’s bedroom for half a decade.
"Where are those to go, Mr. Moretti?" Mrs. Delaney asked tentatively, looking toward Santiago, who stood at the top of the stairs with a mug of black coffee.
Before Santiago could answer, Julianna emerged from the bedroom.
She had slept perhaps three hours, yet she looked transformed. She wore a tailored charcoal wool trouser and an ivory silk blouse that Tomas had procured from a high-end boutique in the Gold Coast at dawn, her auburn hair neatly pinned back. She held a stack of blue bed linens and matching throw pillows.
"Burn them," Julianna said briskly to the guards.
The guards looked at Santiago.
Santiago took a sip of his coffee. "You heard Dr. Vance. Burn them."
Mrs. Delaney’s eyes nearly popped out of her head. "Dr. Vance?"
"Dr. Vance is now in charge of Sophia’s care and rehabilitation," Santiago announced, his voice carrying down the long corridor so that every servant and guard within fifty feet heard it clearly. "Her instructions regarding my sister are absolute. If she asks for the roof to be painted yellow, you bring her paint. If she asks for a wall to be torn down, you bring her sledgehammers. Does everyone understand?"
"Yes, Mr. Moretti," the staff murmured in unison.
Julianna looked back at Santiago. A small, sardonic smirk touched the corner of her lips.
"Yellow is a bit aggressive, Mr. Moretti," she remarked as she stepped back into the room. "We’re going with sage green. Sophia chose it from the swatch book twenty minutes ago."
Santiago followed her inside.
The room looked completely different without the stifling blue draperies. Pale morning sunlight flooded across the floorboards, cutting through the shadows that had lived in the corners for years. Sophia was sitting at her small writing desk. In front of her was a large pad of heavy watercolor paper and a set of professional graphite pencils that Julianna had requested that morning.
Sophia was drawing.
Her fingers moved with surprising speed, sketching the silhouette of an oak tree outside the window. When Santiago entered, she didn't hide the paper. She didn't shrink back.
She looked up at him.
Her gaze was still guarded, still layered with years of hurt and distance, but she did not turn away.
Santiago stopped a few feet from the desk, remembering Julianna's second condition. He looked directly into his sister's eyes.
"Good morning, Sophia," he said, his voice dropping to a gentle timbre that none of his business associates would have ever recognized.
Sophia blinked. Her hands hovered over the paper.
She didn't sign. She didn't write. But she gave a single, deliberate nod of her head.
Santiago felt an electric jolt run down his spine. It was the first direct acknowledgment she had given him in nearly fourteen months.
"Dr. Vance says you need a new wardrobe," Santiago continued, keeping his hands relaxed at his sides. "I’ve arranged for a tailor from Michigan Avenue to bring fabrics this afternoon. You can pick whatever you want. No blue."
Sophia looked down at her sketch, and then, very slowly, the corners of her mouth twitched upward.
Julianna stood by the window, watching the exchange with her arms crossed. Her hazel eyes were analytical, tracking every micro-expression on both siblings' faces, but beneath the clinician’s gaze, Santiago saw something warm and genuinely moved.
"Come with me, Mr. Moretti," Julianna said, stepping toward the hall. "We need to discuss the protocol."
Santiago followed her out into the gallery. She led him down to the library on the ground floor, closing the heavy doors behind them to ensure complete privacy.
She turned to face him, leaning back against the edge of his mahogany desk.
"She has profound post-traumatic mutism accompanied by psychogenic limb tremor in high-stress situations," Julianna began without preamble. "Her vocal cords are physically intact. Her auditory processing is superior. But the night your parents died, the neuro-chemical shock effectively created an iron door between her language processing centers and her motor output for speech."
Santiago stood before her, his hands clasped behind his back. "The doctors told me it was irreversible brain damage."
"The doctors you hired were lazy," Julianna said bluntly. "They were geriatric neurologists and high-priced consultants who specialize in medicating symptoms rather than doing the brutal, exhausting cognitive work of rebuilding shattered neural pathways. They gave her tranquilizers when she had panic attacks, which only reinforced the silence by deadening her sensory engagement."
"And your protocol?"
"My protocol doesn't treat the silence as a disease," Julianna said, stepping closer. "It treats the silence as a fortress. Sophia went non-verbal because the world outside became too violent and terrifying to speak to. She felt completely powerless. If you want her to speak, you cannot force words out of her. You have to give her back her agency. You have to let her say *no*. You have to let her be angry."
Santiago looked down at her. "She is angry at me."
"Of course she is," Julianna said softly. "You built this estate into an impenetrable bunker. You have twenty armed men patrolling the lawn with submachine guns under their coats. You bring the violence that killed your parents right up to her bedroom window every single day, Mr. Moretti. You think you're protecting her, but to Sophia, this house is just the high-security wing of a prison."
The words cut deep, but Santiago did not flinch. He recognized the truth in them, and the pain of that truth was a penance he had long anticipated.
"What do we do?" he asked.
"We build a bridge," Julianna said. "Sign language first. Tactile communication. Creative expression. Then, vocalization exercises through controlled rhythmic breathing. It will take months. It will be painful. She will scream, she will throw things, and she will have days where she refuses to look at either of us."
"And if Castiglione finds you before we finish?" Santiago asked, his voice dropping into a dark, gravelly murmur.
Julianna’s eyes darkened. A shadow passed over her features, cold and heavy.
"Then I will make sure Sophia has enough tools to keep going without me," she whispered.
Santiago took two slow steps forward until he was standing directly in front of her. The space between them shrank to inches. Julianna had to tilt her head back to meet his gaze.
"Listen to me, Julianna," he said, using her real name with an intimacy that sent a shiver straight down her arms. "You brought my sister back from the dead this morning. You gave me back the only part of my life that wasn't covered in blood and business. No one is taking you from this house. Not Castiglione. Not the federal government. Not God Himself."
Julianna stared at him. She saw the absolute, terrifying sincerity in his dark eyes—a ruthless dedication that had built a criminal empire, now turned entirely toward her protection.
Her breath caught in her throat. For three years, she had been a hunted animal, living on stale bread, jumping at every car horn, terrified of her own shadow. She had carried the weight of her brother's murder and her own erased existence entirely alone.
Now, this dangerous, lethal man was offering to stand between her and the abyss.
"You don't know Lucian Castiglione," she whispered, her voice wavering slightly. "He is a monster, Santiago."
"He is a man," Santiago replied, his hand rising slowly, hesitating for a fraction of a second before his knuckles lightly, almost reverently brushed against the soft contour of her jawline. "And I have killed worse men before breakfast."
Julianna felt the warmth of his skin against hers, a searing contrast to the freezing sleet outside. Her heart hammered against her ribs, not with fear, but with an electric, overwhelming sensation that made her knees feel weak.
She didn't pull away.
For three long seconds, the mafia kingpin and the ghost doctor stood locked in a silence that was louder than any word spoken in the mansion for seven years.
Then, a sudden, sharp vibration broke the spell.
Santiago pulled his phone from his pocket, stepping back. Julianna let out a quiet breath, her cheeks flushed with heat.
Santiago glanced at the screen. It was an encrypted text from Tomas:
*Castiglione's primary lieutenant just landed at O’Hare. He's meeting someone in the West Loop.*
Santiago stared at the screen, his face hardening back into the impenetrable mask of the Moretti boss. He slipped the phone away and looked at Julianna.
"Focus on Sophia today," Santiago said, his voice perfectly controlled. "I have some family business to attend to."
Julianna watched him turn toward the door. "Santiago."
He paused, looking back over his shoulder.
"Be careful," she said softly.
May you like
A faint, lethal smile touched Santiago’s lips. "Always, Dr. Vance."
---
