Chapter 3 - THE BROTHER WHO SOLD THE HOUSE
I woke two days later with a tube in my nose, pain across half my body, and Marco DeLuca asleep in a chair beside my hospital bed.
At first, I thought the medication had created him.
He wore a clean black shirt, but his face looked worse than it had in the rain. Dark circles bruised the skin beneath his eyes. His chin was rough with stubble.
My silver necklace lay around his wrist.
“That belongs to me,” I whispered.
His eyes opened immediately.
“You’re awake.”
“Excellent observation.”
Relief crossed his face so openly that I almost looked away.
He removed the necklace and placed it carefully in my palm.
“Your brother is here.”
Panic cut through the fog.
“Danny?”
“He is safe.”
“How does he know?”
“The hospital called your emergency contact.”
I closed my eyes.
Danny was twenty-six, proud, and still learning to walk again. The last thing he needed was to see me connected to organized violence.
“He cannot afford to miss therapy.”
“He will not.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing you need to worry about.”
I looked at him.
“That usually means you did something I will hate.”
“I arranged transportation and transferred his rehabilitation to the medical center’s residential program.”
“Without asking me?”
“Your current balance was overdue.”
Shame burned beneath my ribs.
“You searched my finances again.”
Marco’s expression tightened.
“I deserved that.”
“You do not get to buy forgiveness.”
“I am not trying to.”
“Then what are you doing?”
He looked toward the door.
“Making certain Caruso cannot reach the only family you have left.”
I remembered the gun.
“Did you find him?”
“No.”
“Adrian?”
Marco’s silence answered.
His younger brother had vanished hours after the attack.
Adrian was thirty-four, charming, reckless, and permanently resentful that Marco inherited control after their father died. He ran several legitimate DeLuca businesses but complained that Marco treated him like a child.
“Why would he want Isabella dead?”
Marco stood and moved toward the window.
“My mother controls the family trust. If she dies, her voting shares pass equally to Adrian and me.”
“That would not give him control.”
“It would if I died with her.”
The ambush had been designed to kill both.
Isabella first.
Marco when he ran toward her.
Caruso’s gun had been the final insurance.
“What did Adrian promise him?”
“Control of security operations, access to our ports, and ten million dollars.”
“How do you know?”
Marco placed the black keycard on my bedside table.
“You copied more than access records.”
The archive contained deleted audio from a garage camera. Caruso and Adrian had discussed the plan beside an idling SUV.
But one section was missing.
“They mentioned a woman,” Marco said. “Someone inside the house gave them Isabella’s medical schedule.”
“A nurse?”
“Only you and Dr. Hart knew her exact appointments.”
I turned toward him.
“Are you accusing me again?”
“No.”
He answered without hesitation.
“I am telling you the information came from Dr. Hart.”
I remembered the doctor arriving unusually quickly after the shooting.
His medical suite had already been prepared for trauma.
“He expected someone to be injured.”
Marco nodded.
“We searched his office. He altered my mother’s medication for months.”
My pulse climbed.
“Altered how?”
“He reduced her heart medication and increased drugs that caused fatigue and confusion.”
Isabella’s decline had not been natural.
Someone had been making her weaker.
“Why did her blood tests not show it?”
“He controlled the reports.”
“Where is he?”
“Under guard.”
“You should call the police.”
Marco gave me a long look.
“You know who I am.”
“Yes. That is why I said it.”
“He tried to kill my mother.”
“Then let evidence destroy him.”
“Evidence can disappear.”
“So can men held in basements.”
Anger flashed across his face.
I did not look away.
“You called me nobody because you thought power meant being feared,” I said. “Caruso feared you. Adrian feared you. Dr. Hart feared you. Look what that loyalty was worth.”
Marco’s expression hardened.
“Do not lecture me from a hospital bed.”
“Then leave.”
He stared at me.
“Get out.”
His hand tightened at his side.
For a moment, I saw the man from the foyer—the man who could humiliate someone simply because the room allowed it.
Then he stepped back.
“You are right.”
I had not expected that.
“About which part?”
“All of it.”
He left.
Danny arrived an hour later using forearm crutches.
He tried to smile when he entered the room, but his face collapsed as soon as he saw the bandages.
“You said the DeLucas were private, not insane.”
“I may have minimized.”
He lowered himself into the chair.
“A man named Mateo searched my apartment.”
“For protection.”
“He found this behind the air vent.”
Danny placed a small brown envelope on my blanket.
Inside was a photograph of our father standing beside a younger Isabella DeLuca.
On the back, someone had written:
Thomas Carter saved her once. His daughter may have to finish it.
My father had died when Danny and I were teenagers.
We were told he had been killed during a warehouse robbery.
He worked nights as a security guard.
Or that was what our mother had believed.
Marco returned before I could call him.
He looked at the photograph and lost all color.
“Where did you get this?”
“My brother’s apartment.”
Marco turned it over.
“Thomas Carter was not a security guard.”
“You knew him?”
“He worked for my father.”
My throat tightened.
“Doing what?”
“He was the DeLuca family’s chief investigator.”
Danny stared at him.
“Our dad was in the mob?”
“No,” Marco said. “He was trying to bring it down.”
The room went silent.
Marco looked at me.
“Your father was a federal informant.”
May you like
The ambush was not the first connection between my family and the DeLucas.
It was the unfinished end of a betrayal that had begun twenty years earlier.
