“Call a doctor,” he told Harold. “And send a car for her mother.”
Emma panicked. “No! Please don’t be mad at Mommy. She wanted to come. She tried. She got dressed and then she fell down.”
Lucas turned back sharply.
“She fell?”
Emma nodded. “In the bathroom. I put a pillow under her head. She said not to call anyone because hospitals cost too much.”
The room shifted.
Lucas’s voice dropped. “How long ago?”
Emma looked at the carpet. “Before lunch.”
Every man in the room understood at once.
That was hours ago.
Lucas snapped his fingers. “Now.”
The estate exploded into motion.
Harold rushed out. A guard spoke into his radio. Another man ran for the garage. Lucas lifted the phone from his desk, barked three orders, and within sixty seconds, a private physician, two drivers, and his most trusted medic were on their way to Anna Carter’s apartment.
Emma stood in the center of it all, trembling in her ridiculous apron.
Lucas crouched before her again.
“Your mother is going to be helped,” he said.
“Do you promise?”
Promises were dangerous. Lucas did not make them unless he intended to bleed for them.
“I promise.”
Emma searched his face with heartbreaking seriousness.
Then she whispered, “Mommy said you might be mean.”
A short, stunned laugh escaped one of the guards before he quickly swallowed it.
Lucas raised an eyebrow. “Did she?”
Emma nodded. “But she said mean people still need clean houses.”
For the first time in seven days, Lucas almost smiled.
Harold returned carrying a towel and a blanket. Emma allowed herself to be wrapped in both, but refused to remove the apron.
“It’s Mommy’s,” she said.
Lucas did not argue.
While she ate soup in the library under the watchful eye of Harold’s wife, Lucas stood alone in the hall with the resume still in his hand.
The address bothered him.
Not because it was poor.
Because he knew the building.
A brick apartment block in South Boston owned by a shell company that belonged to one of his captains.
Marco Bell.
Lucas had trusted Marco for eleven years.
Marco had been in the driveway the night the Bentley exploded.
Marco had cried afterward.
Marco had also suggested hiring new cleaning staff.
Lucas looked down at Anna Carter’s resume again.
A cleaning woman too sick to come. A child sent in her place. A job opening inside his house one week after an assassination attempt.
Coincidence had never survived long around Lucas Blackwood.
His phone rang.
He answered before the first vibration finished.
“Talk.”
It was Victor, his medic. Rain roared in the background.
“We found the mother,” Victor said. “Alive. Barely. Severe fever, dehydration, head injury from the fall. But that’s not the worst part.”
Lucas’s jaw tightened. “What is?”
“There were men outside her building. Not ours. They ran when we arrived.”
Lucas closed his eyes for one second.
“Bring her here.”
“Sir, she needs a hospital.”
“Bring the hospital here.”
Victor paused. “There’s something else.”
Lucas waited.
“We found a folder hidden under her mattress. It has your name on it.”
The hallway seemed to narrow.
“What kind of folder?”
“Photographs. Bank slips. A copy of a birth certificate.”
Lucas felt the air leave the house.
“Whose birth certificate?”
Victor’s voice lowered.
“Emma Carter’s.”
Lucas turned slowly toward the library door.
Through the crack, he could see Emma sitting at the table, both hands wrapped around a mug, her small face lit by firelight. Harold’s wife was speaking gently to her, but Emma’s eyes kept drifting toward the door, waiting for news about her mother.
“What does my name have to do with her birth certificate?” Lucas asked.
Victor answered after a silence.
“Sir… under father, it says unknown. But tucked behind it is a photograph of you from nine years ago. And written on the back are three words.”
Lucas did not breathe.
Victor said, “
He must never know.
”
The storm crashed against the windows.
For the first time in years, Lucas Blackwood felt something colder than fear.
Memory.
Nine years ago.
A woman named Anna.
Not Carter then.
Anna Moretti.
A waitress in a small North End restaurant where Lucas had gone one night after a war meeting, covered in blood that was not his. She had brought him coffee without asking questions. She had looked at him as if he were a wounded man instead of a monster.
For six weeks, Lucas had become someone else in the back booth of that restaurant.
Then his father discovered her name.
Three days later, Anna vanished.
Lucas had searched for her, quietly at first, then violently. Nobody knew where she had gone. His father had said she was a clever girl who understood that Blackwood men did not get happy endings.
Lucas had believed she left him.