THE ECHO OF LORENZO

I stared at Vincent, my breath catching in my throat, unable to process the words hanging in the air between us.

“Your... sister?” I stammered, shaking my head violently. “No... no, that’s impossible! My mother was a waitress from Queens! She raised me in a tiny apartment above a bakery!”

“Your mother fled Chicago twenty-two years ago, Lucy,” Vincent revealed quietly, stepping back slightly to give me space, though his dark eyes never left my face. “She stole the private ledger belonging to our late father, Lorenzo Viscari, to protect you from being used as a pawn in an arrangement with the Moretti syndicate.”

He turned the black-and-white photograph around, holding it up beside my face.

“You carry her exact face, Lucy,” Vincent said softly. “And that lullaby you were humming on the ladder... it wasn't just a song. It was the private melody my mother sang to Sofia and me every night in Calabria before we came to America.”

My knees buckled. I gripped the edge of the mahogany desk to keep from falling onto the floor.

Everything I had ever known about my life, my family, and my past was disintegrating in front of my eyes. My quiet, hardworking mother—the woman who had scrubbed floors to buy my childhood clothes—was the runaway daughter of Chicago’s most dangerous mafia patriarch.

“My brother...” I gasped out, terror seizing my lungs. “Matthew... does he...?”

“Matthew is Sofia’s son,” Vincent confirmed. “Your brother carries Viscari blood. Which means every rival family in this city, every corrupt federal agent, and every lieutenant looking for leverage would tear Chicago apart to find both of you if they knew you existed.”

Suddenly, the heavy double doors of the office burst open.

Vincent’s chief lieutenant, Marco—a tall, broad-shouldered man with a scar running through his dark eyebrow—hurried into the room, holding an encrypted satellite tablet.

“Boss,” Marco said urgently, stopping dead in his tracks when he saw me standing beside the desk. He looked at Vincent with deep concern. “We have a breach. Paulie Moretti’s crew just intercepted a surveillance report from the cleaning agency.”

Vincent’s posture instantly shifted. The gentle, melancholic uncle vanished, replaced in a fraction of a second by the ruthless, icy kingpin of River North.

“What did they see?” Vincent demanded, his voice dropping into an icy register.

“A scout for the Moretti family took a high-resolution photo of Lucy leaving her apartment complex this morning,” Marco reported, holding out the tablet. “Paulie matched her face against the old Viscari archives within twenty minutes. They know she’s Sofia’s daughter, Boss.”

My heart stopped. “They... they know who I am?!”

“Where is her brother?” Vincent barked, stepping over to Marco, grabbing the tablet.

“Matthew is at his high school on 18th Street,” Marco answered. “Paulie sent two vehicles to pick him up.”

“No!” I shrieked, lunging toward Marco, grabbing his tactical jacket in pure panic. “No! Not Matthew! Please! He’s just a kid! He has asthma, he can't handle stress!”

Vincent moved with terrifying speed. He grabbed my wrists gently but firmly, pulling me against his chest, locking his arms around me to hold me steady while I sobbed wildly against his suit jacket.

“Look at me, Lucy,” Vincent commanded softly, his voice cutting through my hysterical weeping. “Look at me.”

I forced my eyes up to meet his glacial, unyielding stare.

“I spent twenty-two years failing to protect your mother,” Vincent promised, his dark eyes burning with absolute, lethal authority. “I will burn every street in this city to ashes before I let anyone touch a single hair on your brother’s head.”