Chapter 13 - The bank in Zurich
By six in the morning, Dr. Morrison had arrived under armed escort, administering vitamins and proper burn creams to Noah’s extremities before giving him a mild sedative to ensure he slept without nightmares. Noah was tucked into the master bedroom under the watchful guard of four of Richard’s most trusted hitmen.
Downstairs in the lodge’s private study, the air was thick with the bitter smell of burnt tobacco and cold adrenaline. Sal threw a stack of decrypted bank statements and burner phone logs onto the desk.
"Noah was telling the truth, Boss," Sal said, his face grim. "We cracked Mark’s encrypted ledger on his laptop. The forty million didn't come from a rival family. It came through three dummy corporations registered under the Moretti syndicate out of Boston. The head of their logistics division is a man named Dominic Russo—street name 'The Viper,' or the Snake."
Viktor leaned over the desk, using a bone-handled knife to flip through the pages. "Dominic Russo runs the port of South Boston. Human trafficking, illicit pharmaceuticals, stolen cargo containers. Mark was going to hand Noah over to Russo to be shipped out of the country so there would never be a body to find, never a DNA match, never an heir to inherit the Bellacorte empire."
Richard stood by the panoramic window, watching the sun begin to breach the snow-capped Colorado peaks. The golden light offered no warmth. "Mark was willing to sell his own nephew into human bondage for forty pieces of silver and a seat at the Moretti table."
"There's more," Sal added quietly, his fingers hovering over a printed wire transfer. "The transfers didn't start with Mark. They started two years ago. To an account in Zurich belonging to a private sanitarium."
Richard turned sharply, his silver brows furrowing. "A sanitarium? Who was in a sanitarium?"
"Sarah," Sal replied, his voice dropping to a whisper.
The entire study seemed to drop ten degrees. Richard's breath hitched in his throat. Sarah was his daughter—his only daughter, the light of his life, who had supposedly died of an accidental fentanyl overdose five years ago in a Chicago penthouse. It was her death that had initially broken Richard, causing him to retreat partially from the daily operations of the family, leaving the door wide open for Mark’s ambition.
"Sarah is dead," Richard growled, stepping toward Sal, his eyes wild. "I stood at her casket. I watched her lowered into the earth in St. Patrick’s Cemetery."
"You watched a closed casket, Don Richard," Viktor intervened softly, his voice deadpan and analytical. "Mark handled the funeral arrangements while you were in the ICU suffering from pneumonia. Mark identified the body. Mark hired the private crematory service before the burial."
Richard slammed both palms onto the mahogany desk with enough force to crack the polished finish. "Are you telling me my daughter is alive?"
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"I'm telling you someone was paying five hundred thousand dollars a quarter to keep a patient under the name 'Sarah Bell' sedated in a clinic outside Zurich," Sal said, holding out a single passport-sized photo printed from the hospital’s medical database.
Richard snatched the paper. The woman in the photo was gaunt, her long dark hair threaded with gray, her eyes sunken and hollow—but there was no mistaking the curve of her jaw, or the small birthmark right beneath her left ear. It was Sarah.
