He Ransomed His Secret Son and Left Our Daughter novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Saint

The name belongs to the most feared man in New York, whose baby daughter was stolen 28 years ago; he calls, he cries, he makes two promises, and a man with a cooler of insulin is already at her car window.

I stared at the name for a full minute and decided the app was broken.

Everybody in New York knew that name.

The newspapers called him a shipping magnate.

The streets called him Il Santo, the Saint.

He was the man every family on the East Coast answered to.

Even the Bratva stepped off the sidewalk when his cars went by.

Parent and child, 99.99 percent.

It had to be a scam.

Men like that did not turn out to be the father of a foster kid from Newark who aged out with two garbage bags.

I typed his name into the search bar with shaking thumbs.

The fourth headline stopped my heart.

THE ORSINI BABY: 28 YEARS LATER, STILL NO TRACE.

In 1997, an eight-month-old girl named Marlena Orsini was taken from her family's estate on Long Island by a nanny.

The nanny was found dead two days later.

The baby was never found.

Giacomo Orsini had paid for the largest private missing-children DNA registry in the world.

In a rare interview he said, "I will look for my daughter until the day I die. After that, my money keeps looking."

Marlena.

My foster file said I was left at a church in Trenton with no papers.

There was one scrap of paper pinned to my blanket, and it had one word on it.

Marlena.

The phone slid out of my hand and landed on the floor mat.

I would love to say I handled it well.

I didn't.

I sat in a police parking lot and fell apart, because for twenty-eight years I had been nobody.

Being nobody was exactly what had let Colin cut me down to nothing for eight years.

The phone rang on the floor.

Unknown number.

I picked it up and said nothing.

"Hello?"

It was a man, older, and so careful he sounded like he was holding glass.

"Forgive me. The registry flagged a match an hour ago. I have made this call four hundred times in twenty-eight years, and it has never once been real, so if I am..."

He stopped.

I heard him take a breath that shook.

"My name is Giacomo Orsini. Someone took my daughter when she was eight months old. She had a small strawberry-colored birthmark behind her left ear."

My fingers went to the spot behind my left ear.

My second foster mother used to kiss it and call it my lucky berry.

A sound came out of me that I did not recognize.

"It's there," he whispered.

He was crying.

The most feared man in New York was crying into a phone.

"Dio mio. It's there. Where are you? Tell me you're safe. Tell me..."

"I'm not safe," I heard myself say. "And neither is your granddaughter."

The line went silent.

Then something in his voice changed.

The tears were still in it, but underneath them something hardened into steel.

"My granddaughter."

"Her name is Lily. She's five, and she has type one diabetes. Yesterday the Bratva took her and a boy to squeeze my husband, who moves money for the Sartori family."

I had to stop and swallow.

"They let him buy back one child. He chose his mistress's son."

"The mistress is Sartori's daughter. She told me in a police station that if I talk, her father will make sure Lily never comes home. Lily has no insulin. She has less than three days."

I heard movement on his end.

Doors.

Voices.

A man giving orders with the phone still against his chest, though I could hear every word.

Wake the drivers.

Get the plane ready.

The Sartori boss will be at my table in two hours, in his pajamas if he has to be.

Then he came back to me.

His voice was very quiet and very calm.

It was the most frightening calm I had ever heard.

"Marlena. Sweetheart. I need you to hear two things."

"Okay," I whispered.

"The first is that nobody will ever touch you or that little girl again. Not while I'm breathing."

"And the second?"

There was a pause.

"The Sartori boss has kissed my ring for twenty years. The man who runs the Russians owes me his life, and he knows it. Every street they stand on and every dollar they count exists because I allow it."

His whisper turned to ice.

"They took a child from a city that belongs to me. Tonight, they learn whose child it was."

I sat there, frightened.

Someone knocked on my window.

I jumped so hard I hit the horn.

A tall man stood in the rain beside my car, in a black wool coat, with a small blue cooler in one hand.

There was a scar through his left eyebrow.

I hadn't seen him cross the lot.

I lowered the window two inches.

"Mrs. Hargrove." His voice was low and level. "There's insulin in here, and a glucometer. Mr. Orsini put me on the road an hour ago, the minute the registry flagged you."

He looked at my hands on the steering wheel.

"He also said you'd try to drive yourself."

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