He Ransomed His Secret Son and Left Our Daughter novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Seventy-Two Hours

A video of Lily on a cot and a doubled price send Marlena to the precinct, where the detective puts his pen away, the mistress threatens her and admits the test was faked, and the DNA notification finally gets opened: a name.

I didn't open the notification.

Not yet.

At 3:09, my phone buzzed again with a video from a number I didn't know.

Lily was sitting on a cot in a concrete room.

She still wore the purple dress I had buttoned that morning.

Her face was gray, and her lips were cracked and dry.

She looked straight into the camera.

"Mommy? The man says Daddy is coming. Is Daddy coming?"

The video stopped.

A text came in under it.

Tell the lawyer the price for the girl just doubled. Seventy-two hours.

I threw up in the kitchen sink.

Then I rinsed my mouth, washed my face, and did what I had done all my life.

I made a plan, because nobody else was going to.

I was a foster kid who aged out at eighteen with two garbage bags of clothes.

I met Colin when I was twenty, a nursing student with a night job, and he was a broke law student with holes in his shoes.

"I'll be your family, Marlena," he used to say. "I'll be everything you never had."

So I worked double shifts in the ER to pay his tuition.

I sold the one thing I owned, a thin gold chain from the only foster mother who was ever kind to me, to cover his bar exam.

When the Sartori family hired him, he told me it was only corporate work.

When Lily was born, he held her for four minutes and left for a client dinner.

I told myself he was building our future.

The future, it turned out, had been sitting in another woman's apartment for seven years.

At nine in the morning I walked into the Fourth Precinct with the video on my phone.

I said kidnapping.

I said Bratva.

I said my daughter is diabetic and she is dying.

The detective took my statement without writing anything down.

When I said the name Sartori, he put his pen in his drawer and closed it.

"Mrs. Hargrove," he said, not looking at me. "Maybe you should go home and wait for a call."

"I'm not leaving until you..."

The door opened behind me.

I didn't need to turn around.

I smelled her perfume first.

I slid my hand into my coat pocket, found my phone, and pressed record against the rabbit's soft ear.

Valentina walked in.

Because in every way that mattered, her family did.

"Marlena." She said my name with cold disgust. "I was hoping we could skip this."

"My daughter is in a basement," I said, "and your family's money is in the Russians' account."

"Colin made a business decision."

"She's five years old."

Valentina studied her nails.

Then she smiled, and it was the coldest thing I had ever seen on a human face.

"Here's what happens now. You go home. You sign the divorce papers. You stop saying my family's name to policemen."

The detective stared at his desk.

"If you make noise, my father makes one phone call to the Russians, and your daughter stops being a matter of money."

She leaned close enough that I could count her eyelashes.

"Do you know what men like that do with little girls nobody is paying for?"

I couldn't breathe.

She walked to the door and stopped.

"Oh, and that paternity test?" Her smile widened. "It's so easy to arrange when your family owns the doctor. Colin needed a reason to feel good about choosing us. I gave him one."

The door clicked shut behind her.

She had faked the test.

She had let my child be left behind.

And she had just told me, in a police station, in front of a detective, that nobody in this city would ever lift a finger to stop her.

The detective looked at me.

I looked at him.

I took my phone out of my pocket and let him see the red dot.

Then I stopped the recording and walked out.

It was raining.

Seventy hours left.

No money, no husband, no police.

I sat in my car in the precinct lot with my hands shaking on the wheel.

And I finally opened the notification.

DNA Relative Match Found: Parent and Child, 99.99 percent.

Then I read the name.

Giacomo Orsini.

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