Maid Carries Mafia Boss's Injured Son Through The Storm—By Morning Her Life Changed Forever Spotlight8
CHAPTER 1 — THE INCIDENT
The front doors of Blackwood Estate exploded inward at 11:42 PM.
Leora Higgins was on her knees, buffing a scuff mark out of the checkered marble, when the oak panels splintered off their iron hinges and the nor’easter screamed into the foyer like a living thing. Freezing rain and dead leaves swirled through the grand hall. The chandelier swayed, casting frantic shadows.
A man lurched through the shattered doorway.
He took two staggering steps and collapsed. The sound was wet. Final. A dark pool spread beneath him against the white stone.
Leora scrambled backward, her polishing rag slipping from fingers that had gone numb. Her instinct screamed at her to run. She had worked at Blackwood for eight months. She knew what the Moretti family was. Violence was baked into the foundation of this house.
But the man groaned.
She crawled across the wet marble. Turned him over.
It was Leo Moretti. The heir. She had seen him twice before — tall, dark-eyed, radiating an authority that made the other staff lower their gaze. Now his charcoal suit was shredded, saturated with rainwater and blood. Two gunshot wounds painted his torso. His face was the color of candle wax.
“Mr. Moretti.”
His eyes fluttered open. His hand shot out and grabbed her wrist with a grip that should have been impossible for a man bleeding this much.
“They breached the gate.” Blood bubbled at the corner of his lips. “Samuel sold us out. They’re coming up the mountain.”
Samuel Reed. Head of security. If he was the traitor, the entire perimeter was compromised. No guards were coming. The local police were fifty miles away and owned by the Morettis anyway.
They were alone.
“I need to call an ambulance.” She reached for the radio clipped to her apron.
He knocked it away. It clattered across the marble. “No. They’re monitoring the frequencies. You call, they pinpoint my location. They finish the job.”
“You’re bleeding to death!”
“Listen to me.” His voice dropped to a harsh rasp. “If they find me in this house, they kill me. And they kill you for seeing their faces. We have to leave.”
“Leave in this?”
“The groundskeeper’s cabin. Half a mile north. Through the woods. They don’t know about it. Take me there.”
He passed out.
Leora stared at him. She could run. The service tunnels. Her rusted Honda Civic in the staff garage. The flooded mountain roads. She owed this man nothing. His family dealt in blood and shadows.
But she thought of Sophie. Her sister’s small hand in hers. The $84,000 in medical bills. The way hope died a little each day in that hospital room.
She couldn’t leave a man to be butchered on the floor she had just spent an hour polishing.
“Damn it.”
She grabbed his collar and heaved.
Getting Leo Moretti out of the house was a nightmare. He was six-foot-two of dense muscle, dead weight. She was barely five-foot-four. Her spine screamed as she dragged him through the shattered doors into the teeth of the storm.
The rain hit like frozen needles. The mud swallowed her shoes. She slung his uninjured arm over her shoulder and half-carried him toward the dark tree line.
“Wake up! I need you to walk.”
He groaned. The freezing rain brought a surge of adrenaline. He leaned heavily against her, his breath hot and ragged against her ear.
“Keep right. At the stone wall.”
They plunged into the forest.
The canopy offered slight relief, but the ground was worse — exposed roots, slick moss, jagged rocks. Leora’s uniform was soaked through. Her muscles screamed. Her lungs burned.
“Why?” His voice was barely a breath. “Why are you doing this? You’re a maid.”
“Because I’m paid to clean up messes.” She shoved a wet branch out of their path. “And right now, you’re making a massive mess on my shift.”
A weak laugh escaped his chest. “What’s your name?”
“Leora.”
“Leora.” He tasted the name. “If we live through this, I’m giving you a raise.”
“If we live through this, I’m quitting.”
Then she heard it — engines. High-powered, cutting through the storm. She dragged him behind a fallen redwood as three matte black SUVs tore up the driveway. Men with tactical flashlights swarmed the estate.
“Samuel’s men.” His voice was dangerously weak. “The cleanup crew.”
They would find the blood on the marble. They would track the smear into the mud.
“We have to go faster.”
She hoisted him up and pushed deeper into the woods. She lost her right shoe to a sinkhole of mud and didn’t stop. Her foot bled. Every time his knees buckled, she hauled him back up by the lapels of his ruined suit, shouting at him, keeping him conscious by sheer force of will.
Finally, a shadow darker than the trees emerged in the gloom — the groundskeeper’s cabin. Old, dilapidated, overgrown with ivy. She kicked the rotted door open and dragged him inside.
The interior smelled of dust, mold, and old wood ash. It was pitch black. But it was dry.
She lowered him to the floorboards. He was completely unresponsive, his breathing terribly shallow.
“Hey.” She slapped his cheek. Her hands were slick with his blood. “Leo. Do not die on me. I didn’t lose my favorite shoe to drag a corpse through the woods.”
Silence.
She scrambled around the dark cabin. Her hands found a vintage kerosene lantern and a half-used box of matches. She struck a match. The small flame flared.
She lit the lantern and turned the light onto Leo.
The sight made her stomach heave. The wound in his abdomen was steadily weeping dark blood. The blood loss was catastrophic.
If she didn’t stop the bleeding in the next five minutes, the heir to the Moretti Empire would bleed out on a rotting floor.
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And she would be found standing over his corpse by the men hunting him.
