Chapter 3 - Shadows on the Tenth Floor
Sandro didn't shout. He didn't smash the glass.
Instead, a terrifying stillness settled over him—the kind of stillness that precedes a hurricane. He slowly turned his head toward the door where Dr. Holt was currently leaving his office across the hall.
"Reyes," Sandro called out quietly.
The lead guard stepped into the nursery instantly. "Boss?"
"Lock down the ninth and tenth floors," Sandro commanded, his voice cold as arctic ice. "No one enters. No one leaves. If Dr. Holt so much as touches a doorknob, break his legs."
"Yes, Mr. Moretti."
Sandro turned back to Nora, taking a step toward her. "If you are lying to me, Nora..."
"I'm not lying!" Nora said fiercely, pulling her phone from her scrubs pocket. "I pulled the encrypted nursery surveillance logs from 3:00 AM the night of the accident before the hospital tried to wipe the server. Look."
She opened a saved video file. The footage showed Dr. Holt stepping into the private NICU suite carrying a blue thermal transport bag—the kind used for organ delivery. Two minutes later, he walked out with the bag, while a nurse placed a different, sickly infant into the incubator.
"Dr. Holt didn't just misdiagnose this baby," Nora explained, her heart pounding against her ribs. "He brought in a terminal infant from an unrecorded private clinic to act as a decoy. The baby in this incubator has an untreatable metabolic failure—he was already dying when they put him here to give you a believable cover story for your son's 'death'."
Sandro stared at the screen, his chest heaving as rage, shock, and a sudden, fierce flare of hope warred within him.
"Where is my son?" Sandro demanded, his hand reaching out to grab Nora’s forearm—not with force, but with a desperate, trembling grip. "Where is he, Nora?"
"The thermal bag went to the tenth floor," Nora said, checking the timestamp on the log. "To the restricted VIP research wing. The wing funded directly by your family's chief rival—Julian Vance."
Sandro’s jaw clenched so hard a muscle twitched near his temple.
Julian Vance. The man who had been trying to dismantle the Moretti empire for five years. The man who had leaked the route of Elena's car the night of the crash.
"Vance didn't just want my wife dead," Sandro whispered, a terrifying, dark realization dawning on him. "He wanted my heir. He wanted to raise my blood as his own, or use him as leverage to destroy me."
Sandro looked at Nora, his dark eyes burning with an intense, unyielding light.
"You risked your life, your career, and your safety to tell me this," Sandro said, his voice thick with raw emotion. "Why?"
"Because every child deserves their father," Nora said softly. "And no father deserves to grieve a lie."
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Sandro pulled out a gold signet ring from his pocket and pressed it into Nora's palm, closing her fingers over it.
"You're coming with me, Nora," Sandro said. "You're going to bring my son home."
