Chapter 3 - The Gift and the Threat
Before Emma could respond, Gabriel stepped back into his Maybach. The convoy rolled away down the narrow Queens street as smoothly as a fleet of shadows, leaving Emma standing alone on the sidewalk.
She reached into her coat pocket, her fingers trembling as she pulled out the silver envelope.
Inside was not a check.
It was an official deed of title for a commercial property on Seventy-Second Street in Manhattan—the former site of a historical bakery—along with an unlimited corporate credit line established under her name, and a signed receipt from the Green Pastor Care Home declaring that Margaret Brooks’s medical expenses had been paid in full for the next ten years.
Emma staggered against the brick wall, her hand pressed against her mouth as tears spilled over her cheeks.
Ten years of care for her mother. Her mother was safe. She would never be transferred to a state facility. She would never be abandoned.
For the first time in two years, the crushing weight on Emma’s chest lifted, allowing her to breathe.
However, three miles away in a high-rise penthouse in Lower Manhattan, another man was watching a computer screen with pure, unadulterated fury.
Dominic Vance, the head of the rival Vance syndicate and the man who had ordered the sabotage on Sophie Moretti’s vehicle, slammed his whiskey glass onto his glass desk, shattering it into pieces.
“What do you mean she survived?!” Vance roared at his lieutenant, a scar-faced man named Sal. “The truck broadsided the vehicle! The gas tank exploded!”
“Moretti’s daughter was pulled from the wreckage by some factory worker,” Sal reported nervously. “A woman named Emma Brooks. She gave the kid a pint of O-negative blood at St. Catherine’s. The girl is in stable condition under heavy guard.”
Vance’s face twisted into a grotesque sneer. “Gabriel Moretti was supposed to be broken today. He was supposed to be burying his heir while we seized his shipping terminals in Brooklyn.”
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He stood up, walking to the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Hudson River.
“Find this Emma Brooks,” Vance ordered, his voice dropping into a lethal whisper. “If Gabriel Moretti values this woman enough to clear her mother’s debts within three hours of meeting her... then she is his new weakness. Grab her. We’ll use her to draw Moretti out into the open.”
