Chapter 6 - ST. CATHERINE’S RENEWAL CENTERAt 10:17 that night, I stood across the road from the blue house and understood why evil loved holy names.
St. Catherine’s Renewal Center sat behind iron fencing and winter-bare trees, its windows glowing warm against the cold.
From the outside, it looked safe.
Brick walls. White trim. A chapel bell. A playground with yellow swings moving slightly in the wind.
A place donors could visit, smile, write checks, and sleep well after.
But I knew houses.
Good houses made noise.
They had laughter leaking from windows. Footsteps. music. arguments over dinner. The living mess of people unafraid to exist.
The blue house was quiet.
Too quiet for a place full of children.
Enzo stood beside me with binoculars.
“Eight visible guards. Probably more inside. Two vans in the back. Cameras on every corner.”
“Police?”
“None.”
“They bought them?”
“Or they are waiting until midnight to arrive as heroes.”
I looked at the second-floor window.
A woman stood there.
Anna.
She was watching the road as if she knew I had come.
Maybe blood recognized blood.
Maybe she had been waiting her whole life for the man who never came.
Marco approached from behind.
I had not wanted him on this operation.
He came anyway.
“I know a back entrance,” he said.
“Of course you do.”
He absorbed the insult without defense.
“There’s an old delivery tunnel under the chapel.”
“This house has a chapel?”
“It used to be a convent.”
“And now it is a market.”
He lowered his eyes.
We moved in teams.
Quiet.
Fast.
No unnecessary blood.
That was my order, and my men followed it because the one thing more frightening than Dante Moretti angry was Dante Moretti controlled.
I entered through the tunnel with Enzo, Marco, and four men.
The air smelled like damp stone and bleach.
Somewhere above us, a pipe groaned.
Sofia was safe at my estate with Mrs. Alvarez and six guards.
At least, that was what I had told myself until my phone buzzed.
A message from unknown.
You brought soldiers to a nursery.
How predictable.
Then a second message arrived.
Ask Sofia who opened the gate.
My chest tightened.
I called the house.
No answer.
I called Mrs. Alvarez.
No answer.
I turned to Enzo.
“Call the estate.”
He did.
His face changed.
“No response.”
I almost turned back.
That was the trap.
They knew I would.
They wanted me split between the child in my house and the children in theirs.
Then my phone buzzed again.
A photo.
Sofia asleep in Isabella’s old bed.
Beside her, on the pillow, was a white rose.
Someone had been inside my home.
Not to take her.
To prove they could.
Enzo cursed under his breath.
Marco looked sick.
I looked at the photo until my rage became useful.
“We continue.”
“Uncle—”
“If they wanted Sofia dead, they had time. They want me running blind.”
“And are you?”
I slid my gun free.
“No.”
We reached the tunnel door.
Marco pressed three stones in sequence.
The wall clicked.
The door opened into a storage room filled with boxes of donated clothes.
Tiny shoes.
Small coats.
Stuffed animals with missing eyes.
I thought of Sofia’s torn dress.
Something inside me broke quietly.
We moved through the hall.
The first guard never saw Enzo.
The second reached for his radio.
I put him down before he touched it.
Not dead.
Sleeping hard.
We passed rooms with metal bunk beds.
Children slept under thin blankets, all of them too still, too trained not to wake.
Then a door opened at the end of the corridor.
Anna stood there.
No gun.
No guards.
Just a woman in a dark dress with exhausted eyes.
She looked at Marco first.
“You,” she said.
Marco froze.
Then she looked at me.
And the world narrowed to blood.
“You came,” she said.
I could not tell whether it was accusation or relief.
“I did.”
“Twenty-eight years late.”
The words landed exactly where she aimed them.
Enzo raised his weapon slightly.
I lowered it with one hand.
Anna smiled without warmth.
“Still giving orders, old lion?”
I stepped forward.
“Isabella called me that.”
Her face changed.
For the first time, something like grief crossed it.
“She loved you.”
“She hid you from me.”
“No,” Anna said. “She was trying to bring me home.”
Before I could answer, a voice came over the intercom.
Male.
Smooth.
Amused.
“Dante Moretti in my hallway. I have waited a long time for this family reunion.”
Marco whispered, “Voss.”
But Voss was dead.
Dead men do not laugh through speakers.
Unless someone buried the wrong body.
“Bring Anna to the chapel,” Voss said. “Bring the old lion too. Or the children upstairs learn what fire sounds like.”
Anna’s face drained.
“He wouldn’t.”
I looked at her.
A daughter I did not know.
A daughter still trying to believe the devil had limits.
May you like
“He would,” I said.
And for the first time, Anna looked like a child who wanted her father to be right.
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