**My maid’s eight-month-old baby crawled into my office while my enforcer was holding a gun on a traitor, but instead of reacting like the ruthless Mafia Boss everyone feared, I dropped to my knees and cried. The baby had the same eyes, dark curls, and face as the son I had buried three years earlier.**

The basement beneath the Moretti mansion smelled of old stone, damp earth, and copper.

Lorenzo hung from his wrists, suspended by heavy iron chains attached to the reinforced ceiling beams. His face was a mask of purple bruises and dried blood, but his eyes were wide with a manic, terrified energy as he watched me descend the stone steps.

I wasn't wearing my suit jacket. My shirt sleeves were rolled up to my elbows, revealing the dark, intricate tattoos of the family crest that stretched from my wrists to my shoulders. In my right hand, I carried a heavy, solid-brass iron iron bar used for stoking the estate's furnace.

Dominic followed close behind, carrying a thick leather folder filled with financial statements that our cyber team had managed to pull from the house servers over the past two hours.

"Marco..." Lorenzo wheezed, coughing up a fleck of blood. "I swear to God... I didn't know about the kid... I was only taking kickbacks from the shipping docks..."

I didn't answer him. I walked slowly around the iron chair, the heavy brass bar scraping against the concrete floor with a sound that sent shivers down the spine.

"Arthur Vance," I said flatly, stopping directly in front of him. "How long has my chief legal counsel been working for the Russo family in Naples?"

Lorenzo’s breath caught in his chest. His eyes darted nervously toward the dark corners of the cellar. "Vance? You're crazy. Vance has been your father’s lawyer for thirty years. He built the legal structure for the entire Moretti family..."

"And that's why nobody suspected him," Dominic cut in, opening the folder and thrusting a printed bank statement into Lorenzo’s face. "Two hours ago, our tech guys bypassed the firewalls on Vance’s offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. A month before the car crash in Ravello, three million dollars was transferred into Vance’s trust account from a shell company registered in Zurich. The shell company is owned by Antonio Russo."

Lorenzo closed his eyes, his chest heaving as he realized the net was closing in.

"He promised me a cut," Lorenzo whispered, his defiance breaking entirely. "Vance promised me that after you were gone, he would take over the legitimate real estate arm, and I would take over the docks. He said the Russo family was going to back us."

I stepped forward, grabbing Lorenzo by the throat, pinning his head back against the iron chain. "Why did they spare the boy?" I demanded, my face inches from his. "If they targeted my wife’s car, why didn't they kill my son?"

"It... it wasn't supposed to be a kidnapping," Lorenzo choked out, gasping for air as my grip tightened. "Vance wanted the kid alive as collateral! He was going to use Mateo to force you to sign over the deep-water harbor deeds if you ever found out about the embezzlement! But the kid vanished from the clinic in Italy... Vance thought Russo double-crossed him and killed the boy!"

I let go of Lorenzo’s neck, letting him slump forward, gasping and coughing violently.

The puzzle pieces were assembling into a terrifying picture.

Arthur Vance, the man who had sat at my dinner table, the man who had delivered the eulogy at my wife’s funeral, the man who had held my shoulder as I wept over an empty casket—he was the architect of my family's destruction. He had kept my son alive as an insurance policy, only to lose track of him when Elena bravely stole the boy away.

And for three years, Vance had been waiting for the right moment to strike the final blow.

"Where is Vance now?" I asked Dominic.

"He’s at his penthouse in Manhattan," Dominic replied, checking his watch. "He’s scheduled to meet with the city planning board at nine o'clock tomorrow morning to finalize the transfer of the Brooklyn piers."

I looked down at the brass bar in my hand, then toss it onto the concrete floor with a deafening CLANG.

"Call the guards," I instructed Dominic, turning toward the stairs. "We leave for Manhattan in twenty minutes. And Dominic?"