Chapter 10 - The Rehearsal Dinner Ambush Where Thirty-Two Guests Heard The Recording From Benjamin's Teddy Bear
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Under the glare of two Chicago Police detectives in the hospital security office, Dean Arthur Bellini-Vance didn't last ninety seconds before he started singing to save himself from a twenty-year federal kidnapping sentence.
"She called me from a burner phone twenty minutes after she left the Drake Hotel!" the dean sobbed, his hands cuffed behind his back as he sat sweating in a metal folding chair. "She knew the police were going to get a warrant for her arrest because of the wedding planner's statement! She told me to execute the St. Jude's transport order immediately and bring the boy to the private airstrip in Wheeling by two o'clock!"
Luca leaned over the metal table in the security office, his palms flat on the scarred wood.
"Why would she want my son at the Wheeling airstrip if she's running from the police, Arthur?" Luca asked, his voice dangerously soft.
"Leverage!" the dean gasped. "Dante Russo cut her off and froze her access to the East Side accounts after the ultrasound came out at the hotel! And her father refused to wire her bail money! She said the only thing on earth that would force you to wire ten million dollars to a Cayman Islands account and let her board a private jet out of the country without the feds shooting the plane down was if she had Benjamin on board with her!"
Through the small glass window of the security office door, where I was standing in the hallway holding Benjamin's hand alongside Caroline, I saw Luca's knuckles turn white against the table.
She had lost the wedding, lost the trust, lost her baby's biological father, and lost her own father's protection—so in her final, psychotic desperation, she had tried to snatch a sick nine-year-old child out of a hospital bed to use as a human shield to extort ten million dollars.
"Did she tell you where she was going before the airstrip?" the lead detective demanded.
"The First National Bank on Dearborn Street!" Arthur blurted out. "Wait—she had a spare key made for Safe-Deposit Box 409 last week! She said she had bearer bonds and a foreign passport inside that box, and she was picking them up at one-thirty before heading to the rehearsal dinner venue to get her diamonds out of the bridal safe!"
Luca straightened up immediately and walked out into the hallway where we were waiting.
He knelt in front of Benjamin, who was still clutching my hand with one arm and his mother's hand with the other.
"Buddy," Luca said gently, brushing a lock of dark hair off Benjamin's forehead. "The doctors say your oxygen and blood work are completely clear now. How would you feel about going back home to the mansion with Mommy and Mrs. Carter while Rachel and I finish cleaning up this mess?"
Benjamin looked between his father and me, his big brown eyes still wide from the scare in the lobby.
"Are the bad men gone?" he asked softly.
"They're in handcuffs, Ben," Luca promised. "And Marco is putting six men around our house today. Nobody gets through those gates unless you say their name first."
Then Benjamin looked up at me, tugging gently on the gold button of my midnight-blue dress.
"Miss Rachel?"
"Yes, honey?" I crouched down in my bare feet on the hospital carpet so I was eye-level with him.
"Are you coming back before tonight?" he whispered. "Because yesterday we didn't get to look at Orion through my telescope since my throat closed up... and Mommy said you know where all the winter stars are."
My throat tightened with so much warmth and emotion I could barely swallow.
Caroline smiled warmly through her tears, placing a gentle hand on my shoulder.
"I told him in the room upstairs, Rachel," Caroline said softly, looking between Luca and me with deep gratitude. "After what you did for him last night and today, you aren't staff to this family anymore. You're family. And I want you there tonight when he finally gets to make his real birthday wish."
Luca looked down at me crouched beside his son, and the fierce, protective heat in his dark eyes made my heart skip two beats.
"I'll bring her back before sunset, Ben," Luca said quietly. "I promise."
After Marco's armored convoy escorted Caroline and Benjamin safely back to the Moretti estate under heavy guard, Luca and I got into his black Maserati Quattroporte with his personal private investigator, a sharp-eyed former FBI agent named Frank Costello, who met us at the curb holding a thick manilla envelope.
"You moved fast, Frank," Luca said as he pulled out onto Dearborn Street toward the First National Bank. "Did you intercept Vanessa at the vault?"
"Better than that, Boss," Frank said from the passenger seat, handing the thick manilla envelope back to me and Luca. "She never made it inside the bank vault because two of our guys spotted her Mercedes circling the block ten minutes ago and spooked her off when she saw the squad cars parked out front. So we used the warrant the State's Attorney signed an hour ago, along with that brass key #409 Miss Morgan found last night, to open Box 409 ourselves."
I slipped my finger under the clasp of the manilla envelope and pulled out the contents onto my lap.
Inside was a stack of five hundred thousand dollars in unregistered bearer bonds, two fake Canadian passports—one in Vanessa's name, and one for a minor child with Benjamin's passport photo already glued inside under a fake last name!
I gasped, showing the fake child's passport to Luca.
"She was going to take him out of the country under a fake name!"
"Look at the medical folder at the bottom of the envelope, Miss Morgan," Frank said grimly, turning around in his seat. "Because that ultrasound you found on the USB drive last night? That was only half the story."
I pulled out a sealed green chart from a private fertility and genetics clinic in Milwaukee, dated four months ago—May 28th.
Wait.
If the Northwestern Memorial ultrasound from the USB drive showed Vanessa was fourteen weeks pregnant from June... why was there a record from a fertility clinic in May?
I opened the green folder and read the physician's summary sheet aloud:
"Patient: Vanessa Bellini. Diagnosis: Complete bilateral tubal occlusion and premature ovarian failure following cosmetic pelvic complications in 2023. Patient was informed on May 28th that she is permanently sterile and incapable of conceiving naturally or carrying a pregnancy without donor embryos."
The car went dead silent except for the low purr of the Maserati's V8 engine.
"Wait a second," I whispered, staring down at the clinical report in disbelief. "She's sterile?! She can't get pregnant?!"
"Read the next page, Rachel," Luca said, his voice tight as he pulled the car over to the curb across from the bank and took the second sheet from my hands.
It was a cashier's check receipt and a private blackmail ledger written in Vanessa's own handwriting.
The ultrasound from Northwestern Memorial with the birth date May 14, 1998 wasn't Vanessa's scan at all.
It belonged to a twenty-eight-year-old cocktail waitress from Dante Russo's riverboat casino named Chloe Miller—who happened to share the exact same birthday as Vanessa!
"Oh, my God," I breathed, every piece of the twisted nightmare finally falling into place. "Vanessa wasn't even pregnant! She found out in May that she could never have children—and she knew you wanted more kids someday and that the 1962 trust required a biological child from the second marriage to disinherit Benjamin!"
"So she paid off a pregnant waitress who was carrying Dante Russo's illegitimate child," Frank confirmed, nodding grimly. "Look at the contract at the back of the envelope. Vanessa paid Russo and the girl two hundred thousand dollars upfront to fake a pregnancy after the honeymoon, wear a prosthetic belly through the winter, and adopt the waitress's newborn baby boy under a forged birth certificate in Sicily this spring—passing off Dante Russo's bastard as the new Moretti heir!"
My hands trembled as I looked at the pages.
That was why she had panicked so badly at the engagement dinner when Benjamin mentioned the box of baby candles in front of thirty-two guests!
She couldn't claim to be pregnant yet because she had to wait until after the wedding night in Amalfi to pretend the baby was Luca's!
And that was why she had tried so hard to destroy Benjamin—because if she couldn't give Luca a real biological child of his own, Benjamin would always be the only true blood heir of the Moretti line unless she got rid of him permanently!
Luca sat behind the steering wheel in absolute silence for ten seconds, staring at the fake passport with Benjamin's nine-year-old face on it.
Then Frank's police scanner on the dashboard crackled loudly to life:
"All units in the Gold Coast sector—we have a 10-32, armed female suspect spotted entering the rear service entrance of the Cathedral Ballroom on Pearson Street—white pantsuit, grey Mercedes abandoned in the alley—"
The Cathedral Ballroom on Pearson Street.
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That was the luxury reception venue where Luca and Vanessa's wedding rehearsal dinner had been scheduled to take place tonight at six o'clock—and where half a million dollars' worth of Bellini and Moretti family wedding gifts and jewelry were still locked inside the bridal vault!
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