Chapter 11 The Claim
Patience was a word people often used around me.
“Adriano Moretti can wait out anyone. A rival, a war, a market crash—he’ll still be standing.”
But this? This wasn’t patience. This was torture.
Every second since Luca had said the words—she’s your bloodline—I’d been walking around with fire under my skin. I couldn’t focus on meetings. Couldn’t listen to my consigliere droning on about territory. Couldn’t even enjoy the satisfaction of watching men twice my age bend to my authority.
Because none of it mattered.
Not when my daughter existed.
My daughter.
The words still sounded foreign in my head. As if repeating them too often might crack me open. Six years lost. Six years she had been walking, breathing, laughing—and I hadn’t known. Because Isabella had decided she could carry that secret like a weapon.
I should’ve been furious. God knows, a man like me has destroyed people for less. But every time the anger rose, it drowned under something far more dangerous—need. A hunger to see her. To know her. To look in her eyes and find myself there.
So I stopped pretending. I stopped waiting.
I positioned myself where I knew it would happen. Hospitals are predictable places. I had the schedules. I knew when Isabella left the room, when the nurses rotated, when Luca made his rounds.
And then I saw her.
Small. Fragile-looking. Too fragile. My chest went tight the second my eyes landed on her—on the child who was mine. Sofia.
Her curls framed her face, the same dark shade as Isabella’s, but the shape of her eyes—Christ, they were mine. Wide, assessing, too old for her years. I saw myself in that gaze and it nearly floored me.
She clutched a piece of paper, a drawing, like it was treasure. A house. A sun. Isabella, recognizable even through a child’s lines. And next to her, another figure… faint, just an outline.
She had drawn the absence. My absence.
Something inside me splintered.
I moved before I thought better of it. My steps were quiet, but she noticed—sharp eyes, like mine. She looked up, cautious but not frightened.
“Hello,” she said softly, polite.
That one word—my daughter speaking to me without knowing who I was—nearly undid me.
“Hello, little one,” I said, my voice gentler than I knew it could be. My men would never recognize it. Hell, I barely recognized it. “You’re very brave. Hospitals… they’re not easy, are they?”
She shook her head, curls bouncing. “No. But Mama says I’ll be better soon.”
Mama. Isabella. The name was a knife and a salve all at once. She had been everything to this child. Mother. Father. Protector. But she had also been the thief who robbed me of this moment years ago.
Still—I couldn’t bring myself to hate her. Not when I was looking into this girl’s eyes.
“What’s your name?” I asked, though I already knew. I just needed to hear it, to brand it into my memory.
“Sofia.”
The word hit harder than any bullet ever had.
I forced a breath past the tightness in my chest. “That’s a beautiful name. It suits you.”
She gave me a small, shy smile. It was like the sun breaking over storm clouds. God help me, I wanted to see it again and again, wanted to know what made her laugh, what made her cry, what kept her awake at night. I wanted everything.
But I couldn’t have it. Not yet. Not like this.
“Do you know my mama?” she asked suddenly, tilting her head, curious.
My throat closed. For a moment, I saw Isabella’s eyes staring at me through her. The same suspicion. The same need for answers.
“Yes,” I said carefully. “I know her.”
Her little fingers clutched the drawing tighter. “Mama says some people are dangerous.”
Dangerous. That was me, wasn’t it? Even without my name, Isabella had painted me in warning colors.
I crouched down so I was level with her, every inch of me taut with the effort of holding back. “She’s right. Some people are. But not everyone.”
Her brow furrowed like she was measuring my words. And God, the intelligence in that look… she was mine. My heir, my legacy.
The nurse’s voice carried down the hall, calling her back.
Sofia glanced toward the sound, then looked back at me. For just a second, she smiled again—soft, trusting. And it wrecked me.
I wanted to tell her. Wanted to claim her in that hallway, in front of God and the walls and the sterile white lights. I’m your father. You’re mine. I won’t let the world touch you.
But I didn’t. Because she deserved more than a stranger dropping that truth on her shoulders.
Still, as I stood and watched her skip away toward the nurse, her drawing clutched in her hand, I swore something inside me had shifted permanently.
I would not be kept from her.
Not by Isabella’s fear.
Not by the past.
Not by anything.
Sofia Moretti was mine.
And I would claim her.
That night, when I sat alone in my office, the city spread out like a kingdom beneath me, I didn’t think of enemies or allies. I didn’t think of profits or guns.
I thought of a little girl with dark curls and sharp eyes, who had smiled at me without knowing why her chest tightened the same way mine had.
Blood calls to blood.
And now that I’d heard it—felt it—I couldn’t unhear it.
Tomorrow, the war with Isabella would begin.
But tonight, I allowed myself a dangerous thought.
Maybe I had finally found something worth losing everything for.