Chapter 2 - The Echoes of a Blood Oath
The private conference room on the fifty-fifth floor of Vale Global was designed to intimidate. The walls were lined with bulletproof glass overlooking the panoramic sweep of the New York skyline, the furniture was hewn from solid black walnut, and the air was kept at a crisp, clinical sixty-eight degrees.
Right now, it felt like an interrogation cell.
Maya Vance—that was the name on the driver's license her trembling hands had produced downstairs—sat at the edge of the massive boardroom table. Little Emma was coloring quietly with a box of crayons I had sent my executive assistant to buy from a boutique stationery shop down the block, her tongue tucked between her teeth as she shaded a green dinosaur.
I stood by the floor-to-ceiling window, my back to them, staring out at the harbor where cargo ships moved like silent water beetles.
“You’ve been living in Astoria,” I said, my voice echoing off the glass. It wasn't a question. My head of security, Marcus, had already run her social security number through three separate private databases before we even reached the elevator. “A small apartment above a dry cleaner. You work freelance graphic design for boutique advertising agencies. You pay your rent on time. No criminal record. No association with the syndicates.”
“I tried to stay invisible,” Maya said, her voice small but steady. She sat with her hands folded tightly in her lap, her left sleeve pulled down past her knuckles. “In my world, visibility gets you killed.”
I turned around slowly, resting my weight against the mahogany sill.
“Let’s clear something up right now, Ms. Vance,” I said smoothly, letting a sliver of the cold, ruthless apex predator slip through my corporate veneer. “My brother Luca didn't just walk away thirteen years ago. He was carrying twenty-four million dollars in bearer bonds belonging to the Moretti family when he vanished. The official story was that he ran. The unofficial story—the one I spent five years drowning in blood to verify—was that he was executed and dropped in a lime pit in New Jersey.”
Maya flinched, her eyes widening in horror.
“He didn't run with their money,” she whispered fiercely. “He was trying to get away from them. He was trying to protect me.”
“Protect you?” I laughed, a short, humorless sound. “Luca didn't know the meaning of protection. He was a reckless, high-rolling gambler who thought he could outsmart the old man. If he gave you that tattoo, if he left you with his name—or worse, his child—you’ve been sitting on a powder keg for six years.”
Emma looked up from her coloring book at the sound of my raised voice, her gray eyes blinking slowly. I instantly softened my tone, lowering my register.
“Maya,” I said, walking slowly toward the table and pulling out a chair directly across from her. I sat down, leaning forward. “Look at me. If Luca is alive—if there is even a one-percent chance that my brother is breathing—you need to tell me everything. Because if I found you in twenty minutes outside my building, do you know who else can find you?”
Maya’s breath caught. She looked down at the table, her fingernails digging into her palms.
“He isn't alive, Mr. Vale,” she whispered, a single tear escaping and tracking down her chin. “He died three years ago.”
The room seemed to tilt on its axis.
“What did you say?”
“He died,” she repeated, her voice breaking. “In a hospital in Seattle. Under a fake name. Lung failure brought on by chemical exposure. He spent the last seven years of his life coughing up blood and hiding from men who wanted what he hid in a safety deposit box in Zurich.”
I stared at her, my mind racing through a maze of calculated probabilities, old grudges, and buried secrets.
“Chemical exposure,” I muttered, tasting copper in my mouth. “The old docks warehouse fire. The night the Moretti syndicate torched our shipping hub.”
“He never told me the details,” Maya said, shaking her head. “He just told me that if anything ever happened to him, I was never to use the Vale name. He made me swear it. He said the moment my face—or Emma’s face—was connected to Sebastian Vale, the hounds would pick up the scent.”
“Too late for that,” a deep voice rumbled from the doorway.
Marcus stepped into the boardroom, his face as pale as a sheet of bond paper. He held a ruggedized tablet in his hand, his thumb trembling slightly as he swiped across the screen.
“Boss,” Marcus said, ignoring Maya and Emma entirely. “We have a breach. The facial recognition ping from the lobby cameras just triggered an automated alert on the dark net monitoring software.”
I stood up instantly, pushing my chair back. “Whose ping?”
“Not an assassin,” Marcus said grimly, turning the tablet toward me so I could read the encrypted data feed. “It’s a localized ping from a burner device registered to Vincent Moretti’s primary fixer. They didn't see you in the car, Boss. But they saw the little girl. They ran her face through a public school database linked to her mother’s address in Astoria three minutes ago.”
My blood ran instantly cold.
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Vincent Moretti was the ruthless, paranoid successor to the old Moretti crime syndicate—a man I had spent a decade legally castrating through corporate buyouts and hostile takeovers. He had been looking for an excuse to tear my empire down to the studs for years.
And now, his men knew that my dead brother had left behind a little girl with Vale blood running through her veins.
