Chapter 8 - HIS JEALOUS SECRETARY KIDNAPPED THE TWINS TO FORCE THE MAID TO DISAPPEAR—BUT SHE NEVER EXPECTED THEIR RUTHLESS MAFIA FATHER TO COME LOOKING FOR THEM
The photograph had been taken through Mrs. Greene's kitchen window.
That was the detail Natalie couldn't stop seeing. Not the threatening words beneath it, not the unfamiliar number, but the angle: slightly above the windowsill, close enough to capture Lily's purple crayon and Noah's half-finished sandwich. Someone had stood outside the home where her children believed they were safe.
Detective Brooks sent officers immediately. Mrs. Greene was shaken but unharmed. The twins were moved that night to a protected apartment arranged through the department's victim-support team. Natalie accompanied them, while Dominic remained in the hospital under guard.
For three days, life narrowed to a secure door, schoolwork at the kitchen table, and phone calls made only through approved numbers. Natalie told the twins the truth in words they could understand: some adults had made dangerous choices, the police were helping, and none of it was the children's fault.
Noah asked whether Dominic had been hurt because he had ridden his bicycle.
“No,” Natalie told him, kneeling until they were eye to eye. “A bad choice belongs to the person who makes it. You didn't make anyone hurt Dominic.”
Lily asked whether they could ever go to a park again.
“Yes,” Natalie said. “Not today. But yes.”
She meant it. She had no idea how she would make it true.
On Wednesday morning Evelyn called. The trust records had given investigators leverage. Victor's companies were being audited. Daniel Mercer, the technology officer who had manufactured evidence against Natalie five years earlier, had contacted his lawyer and offered to cooperate. Isabella had vanished from her apartment. Her accounts were under scrutiny, but she still had access to a network of people willing to do favors for money.
“Don't underestimate her,” Evelyn said. “But don't let her convince you she's more powerful than the law.”
Natalie looked at the twins drawing at the table. “I just want my children to have a normal day.”
“I know.”
The normal day arrived disguised as an appointment. The children needed a pediatric follow-up after the stress of the attack, and the clinic had arranged a private entrance. Two officers accompanied them. Natalie carried Lily's rabbit and Noah carried the blue bicycle bell he'd insisted on keeping in his pocket.
At the clinic, the doctor spoke gently about nightmares and fear. He gave the children simple exercises for grounding themselves when anxious and reminded Natalie that recovery would take time. For the first time in days, she felt something loosen inside her. This was a room where the adults were helping rather than plotting.
Then the fire alarm sounded.
A nurse opened the door. “We need to evacuate.”
One officer went to verify the route. The second guided Natalie and the children toward a side corridor. Patients moved toward the exits. A woman in blue scrubs appeared at the far end of the hall, carrying a clipboard.
“Pediatric patients this way,” she called. “The main stairwell is blocked.”
Natalie stopped. The woman wore no hospital badge. Her shoes were polished black boots, not the soft footwear the nurses had worn all morning.
“Show me your identification,” Natalie said.
The woman hesitated.
Then the corridor door behind Natalie slammed shut.
A man grabbed the second officer from behind. There was a brief struggle, a cry, and the sound of a radio striking the floor. Natalie pulled Noah and Lily behind her, but the woman in scrubs seized Lily's wrist. Another man appeared from a service doorway and blocked their escape.
“Don't hurt them,” Natalie said, her voice strangely steady. “They're children.”
“Then cooperate,” the woman replied.
Natalie had imagined this moment in a hundred nightmares. She had always pictured herself screaming. Instead she found herself memorizing details: the woman's chipped red nail polish, the smell of cigarette smoke, the green exit sign above the door. She made herself look at Noah.
“Stay with Lily,” she said. “Hold her hand.”
He nodded, terrified but listening.
They were forced into a maintenance elevator and down to a loading bay. A dark van waited with its engine running. Natalie tried to step in with the children. The man blocked her.
“Only the kids.”
“No.”
He gripped her arm. “Don't make this worse.”
Natalie planted herself in the doorway. “If you separate us, they'll panic. You want them quiet? Let me go with them.”
The woman in scrubs glanced at her partner. For a moment Natalie thought she'd succeeded. Then a phone rang. The woman answered, listened, and smiled without warmth.
“Orders changed,” she said. “The mother stays.”
Lily screamed as they pulled her away. Noah tried to reach Natalie, but a man lifted him into the van. Natalie fought until her arm burned. The doors slammed. The vehicle sped away.
The world went silent.
Then the first officer burst into the loading bay with two clinic employees behind him. He caught Natalie as her knees gave way.
“My children,” she said. “They took my children.”
Within minutes Brooks had the clinic locked down and cameras secured. The false alarm had been triggered deliberately. The officers were injured but alive. A witness had seen the van's partial plate, and Natalie described every detail she remembered.
She insisted on speaking for herself when the detectives asked questions. She would not be reduced to the hysterical mother in somebody else's report.
At the hospital, Dominic learned what had happened while a nurse was checking his bandage. He went white and tried to rise from the bed. Pain drove him back.
“Don't,” Natalie said when she arrived. “You can't help them by tearing open your stitches.”
His face crumpled. “I was supposed to protect them.”
“We both were. Isabella planned around the protection we had.”
He stared at the wall. “I can find her.”
“Brooks is finding her. You can give him what he needs.”
Dominic swallowed. “There's a warehouse on the south river. Victor used it for meetings he didn't want on company records. Isabella knows it.”
Natalie immediately relayed the address to Brooks. Dominic gave investigators the names of two former employees who might know the building's access points. He did not ask his men to storm it. He had promised to stop treating the city as his private battlefield, and he kept that promise even when keeping it hurt.
That afternoon a video arrived on Natalie's phone.
Noah and Lily sat on a sofa in an unfamiliar room. Lily held Captain Buttons so tightly that one of his remaining buttons had come loose. Noah's jaw was set in a brave imitation of his mother's. A woman's voice spoke from behind the camera.
“Natalie, I want you to listen. You'll sign a statement saying Dominic isn't the father. You'll withdraw every accusation against me. Then you'll leave Chicago. Permanently. Do that, and the children come home.”
The camera shifted. Isabella Russo stepped into view, immaculate in a cream-colored coat.
“Dominic should have chosen me,” she said. “He was supposed to understand what a woman like me could do for him.”
Natalie felt a fury so cold it steadied her hands.
“She's talking about them as if they're objects,” she told Brooks. “As if she can bargain with their lives.”
Brooks copied the video and asked Natalie not to reply until they had a plan. They traced metadata and background sounds, but Isabella had taken precautions. A distant train horn suggested an industrial district; a clock on the wall indicated the video was recent. The warehouse Dominic named became a priority, though police did not assume the children were there.
Natalie asked to record a response that might keep Isabella talking. Brooks agreed, with a negotiator present. Natalie sat before the camera, her blonde hair falling loose around her shoulders, and spoke directly to the woman who had taken five years from her life.
“You wanted Dominic to believe I was a thief,” she said. “You wanted him to choose you. But these children are not prizes, Isabella. They're frightened. Let them speak to me. Let me know they're safe.”
The reply came twenty minutes later. A short audio clip contained Lily's voice.
“Mommy? Noah says we're going to be okay.”
Then Noah: “We're together. Don't be scared, Mommy.”
Natalie covered her mouth and wept. She replayed the clip once for the investigators and then stopped. She could not bear to make her children's courage into something she consumed for comfort.
That evening, Brooks received a break. Daniel Mercer had been located and brought in for questioning. He admitted that Victor had paid to manipulate the old evidence against Natalie. He also disclosed that Isabella had used an independent logistics company to move cash and people. One of its vehicles had been rented under a false identity matching the partial plate from the clinic.
The company owned two riverfront storage buildings. One was empty. The other had recently drawn unusually high electricity usage.
Police obtained the necessary warrants. Tactical officers prepared to approach cautiously, with child-safety specialists and medical teams nearby. Natalie was told to remain at the station.
“I should be there,” she protested.
“You should be here when they call,” Brooks said. “If Isabella contacts you, we need to respond quickly. Your children need you alive.”
Dominic called from the hospital. Natalie answered on the first ring.
“I want to come,” he said.
“I know.”
“I keep seeing Noah's face at the park. He trusted me.”
“He still does.”
“What if I lose them before I can tell them—”
“Then tell them when they come home,” Natalie interrupted. “And help me believe they'll come home.”
A long silence followed. Finally Dominic said, “All right.”
The first officers entered the warehouse shortly after midnight. They found mattresses, food wrappers, and a small purple crayon on the floor. The children had been there. But the building was empty.
A camera recording showed Isabella leaving with the twins less than an hour earlier. She had learned about the police operation, perhaps from a lookout. The footage caught the rear of a delivery truck as it turned toward the interstate.
Brooks came into the room where Natalie waited. His expression told her the news before he spoke.
“They moved them.”
Natalie stood. “Where?”
“We're following the truck.”
Her phone rang again. Isabella's number flashed across the screen. Brooks signaled the technician to begin recording.
Natalie answered. “Where are my children?”
“You brought the police,” Isabella said.
“I asked you to let me hear their voices.”
“You could have ended this. You could have signed the statement.”
“You know it's a lie.”
Isabella laughed softly. “Truth is whatever the people with power can make others believe.”
Natalie remembered the suitcase she'd carried out of the mansion five years ago. She remembered believing that line herself.
“No,” she said. “Truth is what remains when people like you run out of places to hide.”
Isabella's breathing changed. For a moment she sounded less certain.
Then she whispered, “Tell Dominic his uncle is waiting for him.”
The call ended.
Natalie looked at Brooks. “Victor's with her.”
Brooks was already reaching for his radio.
Outside, dawn began to color the edges of Chicago's skyline. Somewhere beyond those buildings, Noah was holding Lily's hand. Natalie pictured them the way she had seen them at the gala, two small children who had run into her arms without knowing they were about to change a powerful man's life.
She remembered the first night after the twins were born, when the hospital discharged her with two tiny blankets and a list of instructions that seemed impossibly long. She had sat beside their bassinets, exhausted and frightened, and promised that she would never let them mistake another person's rejection for a measure of their worth. Now she wished she could reach across the city and tell them that the promise still stood. Whatever Isabella had said, whatever Victor had threatened, Noah and Lily had done nothing wrong. They were loved before they understood the word, and they would be loved long after the people who frightened them had lost their power. Natalie held on to that certainty as the officers prepared their next search.
She whispered the promise she'd made when they were born.
May you like
“I will find you.”
END OF CHAPTER 8.
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