I Raised The Mafia Boss’s Secret Daughter For Five Years—Until He Caught Her At The Airport / Chapter 88 / 95

Chapter 88 - Whispers in the Catacombs

The safehouse was an abandoned textile warehouse on the northern outskirts of Florence, hidden behind rusted corrugated iron and overgrown cypress trees. The air smelled of damp stone, old motor oil, and dried blood.

Dr. Rossi, an elderly underground physician beholden to Vincent's personal debt ledger, finished stapling the wound along Vincent's left flank. The doctor's hands shook slightly as he wiped a bloody clamp with iodine.

"Two ribs fractured, one bullet nicked the spleen, through-and-through in the lower abdomen," Rossi muttered in Italian, stripping off his latex gloves. "He needs a hospital, Vincent. If sepsis sets in within forty-eight hours, you will die in this cellar."

"Give me morphine and leave," Vincent ordered, his voice flat and hoarse. He was sitting on an overturned wooden crate, his torso wrapped tight in thick white bandages that were already turning pink.

"Vincent..." I began, stepping forward.

"Leave us, Rossi," Vincent repeated, cutting me off without looking at the doctor.

Rossi grabbed his medical kit, tossed a bottle of dark amber pills onto the table, and scurried out the side door, disappearing into the pre-dawn mist. Mateo stood guard at the roll-up door, rifle cradled across his chest, staring out into the empty alleyway.

In the far corner of the warehouse, Maya was curled on an old mattress covered with Mateo's wool coat. Exhaustion had finally claimed her, though her small face was still pinched with distress even in sleep.

I stood over Vincent, my arms crossed, trembling with cold and fury. "Tell me everything. No mafia half-truths. No protective lies. If Julian is alive, why did he let you intercept us at the airport?"

Vincent slowly raised his head. Dark circles hollowed his eyes, his skin pale as ash. "Julian didn't want me to intercept you. When Father found out about Maya three months ago, Lorenzo sent his hounds to trace the trust accounts. Lorenzo wanted to capture Maya to draw Julian out of hiding, because Father suspected Julian was still alive."

"And you?"

"I moved first," Vincent said quietly. "I had an operative inside Lorenzo's surveillance team. When I realized Father had tracked you to the Milan terminal, I intercepted you myself. I took you to my compound to keep you out of Father's reach."

"You locked us in a cage!" I hissed.

"It was the only cage with reinforced steel and three hundred armed guards!" Vincent snapped, his jaw tightening as pain flared through his side. He closed his eyes, inhaling a shaky breath. "Elena... you don't know my brother. Lorenzo was brutal, but he was predictable. He cared about tradition, bloodlines, the family legacy. Julian is a sociopath. He doesn't care about the family. He views human beings as algorithmic assets."

"He called Maya his daughter," I said, my throat tightening. "Is she?"

Vincent was silent for a long moment. He reached out with a rough, calloused hand, catching my wrist. His grip was surprisingly gentle, stripped of all the arrogance he had carried since the day he dragged me into his world.

"Biologically? Yes," Vincent said, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "Julian sired her. But the night she was born, Julian looked at her and saw only one thing: an organic biometric lock. The De Marco emergency reserves—the four billion euros hidden across Swiss and Panamanian nodes—can only be unlocked by a direct genomic match to the De Marco direct line."

The pieces fell together in my mind with sickening clarity. "That's why he needed the vault archive open."

"Yes," Vincent said. "Father's code was step one. Maya's blood is step two. Julian doesn't want to raise her, Elena. He needs her in a clinic in Palermo to extract her bone marrow and DNA sequence to drain the family accounts. Once he has that... she's useless to him."

My knees felt weak. I glanced back at Maya sleeping peacefully in the corner. For five years, I had kissed her scraped knees, read her bedtime stories, and tucked her into bed, believing she was a miracle entrusted to my care.

To her father, she was nothing more than a password.

Before I could respond, the satellite phone on the crate buzzed, vibrating against the raw wood with an ominous hum.