Chapter 13 - The Twelve Children of Sullivan County
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"What does it say?" Enzo asked, leaning forward from his armchair and steadying the crystal tumbler in her hand before it could spill.
Jade stared down at the yellowed ledger paper from 2008, her throat tightening so hard she could barely force the words past her lips.
"All my life," Jade whispered, her finger tracing Entry #9 on the final roster page of Grigori Volkov’s personal intake log, "Grigori told the twelve of us in the Red Sparrow house that our parents were bankrupt addicts and gamblers in Brighton Beach and Eastern Europe who had sold us to his syndicate for five thousand dollars apiece to clear their debts."
"And?" Enzo’s eyes darkened as he looked over her shoulder at the page, where next to the Russian Cyrillic entries were English dates, cities, and six-figure dollar amounts.
"We weren't sold by our parents," Jade breathed, a cold, violent tremor running through her hands. "Look at the intake column for Number Nine—dated November 14, 2003, Boston, Massachusetts."
Enzo read the English name written in parentheses beside the Russian notes:
SUBJECT IX: Elena Vittoria Conti (Age 3).
ACQUISITION SOURCE: Contract clearance — Salvatore Bellini ($250,000 paid to G. Volkov for permanent removal of sole surviving heir after liquidation of Lorenzo & Sofia Conti, North End).
The silence in the bedroom was shattered only by the crackle of a pine log splitting in the fireplace.
Enzo went completely, terrifyingly still beside her.
"Lorenzo Conti," Enzo whispered, his voice dropping to a stunned, hollow rasp. "Lorenzo Conti was my father’s childhood best friend and underboss—the man who controlled the North End and East Boston before Salvatore Bellini stepped up! In November 2003, when I was twelve years old, Lorenzo Conti’s townhouse in the North End burned to the ground in the middle of the night. The fire department found Lorenzo and his wife Sofia shot to death in their bed before the fire started—and the police reported that their three-year-old daughter, Elena, had perished in the nursery room where the roof collapsed!"
Jade lifted her head slowly from the ledger, her green eyes wide and shimmering with unshed tears as she looked at Enzo.
"My name isn't Jade Mercer," she whispered. "And it isn't Anya. My name is Elena Conti."
Enzo’s large, scarred hands came up to frame her face gently, his thumbs brushing beneath her lashes as he stared at her as if seeing a ghost walk out of the happiest years of his childhood.
"I knew those green eyes the second you looked up at me in that booth," Enzo breathed, his voice rough with emotion. "Your mother Sofia was from Venice—she had the exact same emerald eyes. When I was ten years old and you were a toddler in a white dress at Sunday dinners at my father’s table, I used to carry you around the garden on my shoulders while my father and yours smoked cigars on the porch."
A single hot tear spilled over Jade’s lashes, landing on Enzo’s thumb.
"Why didn't Salvatore kill me in the nursery with my parents in 2003?" she asked, her voice cracking.
"Look at the clause below your name in the ledger," Enzo said grimly, his jaw clenching into iron as he translated the numbers and bank codes beneath the Russian notes. "Your grandfather in Venice left your mother a forty-million-dollar shipping trust in a Swiss bank that had a bloodline survivorship clause: if you died before your twenty-fifth birthday without issue, the entire forty million reverted automatically to the Vatican charity fund in Venice. To steal that trust, Salvatore needed you alive until your twenty-fifth birthday—or he needed Grigori Volkov to keep you brainwashed under another name until they could force you to sign the release papers at twenty-five and then put a bullet in your head!"
"Except I burned Grigori’s house down when I was eight and vanished into Maine before they could use me," Jade realized, every piece of her fractured life suddenly locking into place. "And last November I turned twenty-five—which unlocked the trust in Switzerland! That’s why Salvatore and Grigori have been turning every database in New England upside down for the last year looking for me!"
And at ten o’clock this morning—in less than three hours—Don Salvatore Bellini was expecting to walk into the smoking ruins of the Charlestown pier compound thinking Grigori Volkov had delivered both Enzo Moretti’s corpse and the missing girl!
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Enzo stood up from the sofa, pulling Jade to her feet with him, his slate-gray eyes blazing with a vengeance twenty-three years in the making.
"Salvatore murdered your parents, sold you into hell for five years, killed my uncle Marco, and tried to burn us alive tonight," Enzo said, his hands gripping her waist with fierce, possessive strength. "Wait until ten o’clock when the old man sits down at the Commission table—and sees Lorenzo Conti’s daughter walk through the doors beside me."
