Chapter 17 - The secret of the cradle
Richard felt the ground tilt beneath his feet. The mountain air suddenly turned to lead, choking the breath from his lungs. He stared at the note, his mind violently rewinding through decades of memory, through grief, through the carefully constructed lies that had dictated the Bellacorte family hierarchy.
"Boss?" Sal's voice cut through the fog, full of genuine alarm as he saw Richard stumble slightly against the SUV's fender. "Richard, are you hit? Did a bullet catch you?"
"No," Richard whispered, his voice sounding completely hollow, like a man speaking from the bottom of a well. He clamped his hand shut over the locket and the note, turning to look at the little boy currently being strapped into the back seat by Viktor.
Noah looked out the window at him, his large, dark eyes blinking with absolute innocence. The shape of his chin, the curve of his brow, the stubborn set of his jaw—it had never been Mark’s lineage. It wasn't even Sarah’s bloodline in the way Richard had assumed.
Richard remembered seventeen years ago. The bitter winter in New York. The sudden, unexplained disappearance of Helena, the only woman Richard had ever loved with a whole heart—his late wife, who had vanished during the height of the Five Families War. Before she died, she had borne a child in total secrecy, a child that Richard was told had been stillborn in a private clinic in upstate New York. Sarah had discovered the truth years later. Sarah had found the boy, hidden him, and raised him as her own to protect him from Mark’s insatiable greed.
Noah wasn't Richard's grandson.
Noah was Richard's youngest son. The true, direct heir to the Bellacorte empire.
"Sal," Richard said, his voice dropping into a register so dark and cold that even Viktor paused by the truck door. "Call the airstrip. Change our flight plan."
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"We aren't going to New York, Boss?"
"We are going to Zurich," Richard said, his eyes blazing with an unholy fire. "We are going to burn that clinic to the ground and bring my daughter home. And then, we are going to summon every single Capo in North America to the Manhattan estate."
