His Enemy’s Biker Bride

Blood Debt

Roman’s POV

The man who killed my brother was supposed to be dead, so when Dante Moretti promised to reveal his identity in exchange for his daughter, I knew the old bastard was either desperate or setting a trap, and I intended to find out which before the night was over.

“Tell me what you mean,” I said into the phone.

Dante laughed, the kind men used when they believed they had already won. “You heard me, Vescari, the man responsible for Nico’s death is in that room with you, and if you want to know why your brother had to die, bring Valentina home before midnight.”

“You expect me to trust you after four years of lies?”

“I expect you to decide whether revenge matters more to you than the truth.”

The call ended before I could answer, leaving me with a dead man’s name, a scared bride, and a decision I had no intention of making on Dante Moretti’s terms. I had spent four years searching for the person who ordered Nico’s murder, selling property, threatening informants, and tearing apart every business that had been connected to the shipment at the docks, yet every lead had ended with another dead witness or a missing record. Now Dante was offering me the truth as though it were a wedding gift, and I would have been a fool not to suspect that he wanted something much more valuable in return.

Valentina stood on the other side of my desk, still wearing the clothes she had escaped in, with a small bag resting beside her chair. She looked nothing like the spoiled mafia princess I had imagined, but that did not make her innocent, and I had seen enough innocent faces hiding ugly secrets to know better than to trust appearances.

“Did you know my father was going to call you?” she asked.

“No.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I believe your father knows something he doesn’t want me to discover without his permission.”

She looked at the photograph on my desk, the one showing her outside the repair shop. “If he knows I’m here, he will send people to get me.”

“He already has.”

I called Dario, my second in command, and told him to check the road outside the shop, identify the black car, and find out who had sent the threat. He had barely left the office when a crash sounded from the main workshop, followed by a man shouting that someone had driven through the side entrance.

I pulled Valentina away from the office door as a gunshot rang out.

“Stay here,” I ordered.

“I’m not staying alone while someone is shooting at us.”

“That wasn’t a suggestion.”

I took the pistol from the drawer and went into the workshop, where my men were moving behind the motorcycles for cover. Two men in helmets had entered through the damaged door, firing toward the workbenches, while a third remained outside beside a running motorcycle. They weren’t trying to rob the place, and they weren’t interested in killing everyone inside, either. Their shots were too controlled, their movements too deliberate, and when one of my men returned fire, the attackers immediately changed direction toward the office, they had come for Valentina.

I fired at the nearest attacker, forcing him behind a vehicle, then reached the office before the second man could get through the corridor. Valentina was still there, but she had picked up the heavy metal lamp from my desk and was standing beside the back exit.

“Planning to hit them with that?”

“If you have a better weapon, I’m willing to listen.”

I handed her a spare pistol, checked that the safety was off, and pulled her through the back exit into the narrow alley behind the building. My men would handle the attackers, but I had no intention of waiting around to discover whether more were on their way.

A motorcycle was parked near the alley entrance, and I took the keys from the hook beside the back door.

“Can you ride?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Good, because we’re leaving.”

She climbed on behind me, holding the pistol in one hand and my jacket in the other, and I drove through the back streets toward an old garage outside the city center. It belonged to the club, but almost nobody knew about it, which made it the safest place to take someone whose own family wanted her returned before midnight.

During the journey, I kept thinking about the way the attackers had gone straight for the office. Someone had told them exactly where Valentina was, and whoever had given that information knew my men well enough to predict how we would respond.

When we reached the garage, I called Dario again.

“Any news?”

“We caught one of them,” he said. “The other two escaped, but we found something on the man we have.”

“What?”

“A phone with a message from a number registered to a company owned by the Morettis.”

That was hardly surprising, but then Dario continued.

“The message said, ‘Bring the girl back alive. The documents must be destroyed before she remembers what her mother did.’”

I ended the call and went inside, where Valentina was examining the photographs she had taken from her father’s study.

“What did you do?” she asked when she saw my expression.

“Your family just tried to take you back by force.”

“Did you catch them?”

“One of them.”

She looked relieved for about a second, until I told her about the message.

The documents must be destroyed before she remembers what her mother did.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Try harder.”

“I told you everything I knew about the papers.”

“Your mother was mentioned in the message, Valentina. That means this is bigger than your wedding, and if you want my help, you need to tell me everything that might be connected to her.”

“My mother died when I was seventeen. My father said she had been sick for months, but he never allowed me to see her medical records. After the funeral, he took everything from her bedroom, including her jewelry and the papers she kept in a locked box.”

“What happened to the box?”

“I don’t know. I asked him about it once, and he told me to stop digging up the past.”

I knew that answer too well. Men like Dante did not hide things because they wanted to protect their children, they hid them because the truth could cost them money, power, or their lives.

“Did she leave you anything else?”

Valentina showed me the gold key.

“My mother gave me this a few weeks before she died. She told me to keep it somewhere safe, but she never said what it opened.”

I took the key and examined the small symbol engraved on its handle, a circle crossed by two lines. I had seen that mark before, on the back of a metal case recovered from the docks after Nico’s death.

For four years, I had believed the case contained shipping records connected to the murder, but it had disappeared before I could open it.

“Where did your father keep your mother’s things?” I asked.

“At the family estate, probably. But I can’t go back there.”

“You won’t have to.”

I called Dario and asked him to find the old case from the docks, then gave him the symbol’s description. If the key matched the lock, we might finally have something that could expose the people responsible for Nico’s death.

Valentina remained quiet while I searched the shipment records on my laptop, and I noticed that she had begun reading one of the photographs more carefully.

“Roman, this company isn’t just connected to the shipment.”

I turned the screen toward her.

“What are you talking about?”

She pointed to a line near the bottom of the page. It listed a company that had paid for storage at the docks four years earlier, but the company name had been changed twice since then.

“My father used this company to pay for my mother’s medical treatment. I remember seeing the name on the bills.”

I searched the records again and found the date of the last payment, which had been made three days before Nico died.

The same company had paid for the warehouse shipment that night.

For the first time, I wondered whether my brother’s death and Valentina’s mother’s illness had been connected all along.

Then Dario called back.

“I found the case,” he said. “It was never destroyed. Someone kept it in the club’s old storage unit, and there’s a name written on the inside cover.”

“Whose name?”

“Your father’s, Roman.”

My father had died when I was twenty, long before Nico was killed, and as far as I knew, he had never dealt with the Morettis. But Dario had no reason to lie, and the case could not have carried his name by accident.

“Bring it here,” I ordered.

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because someone got to the storage unit before me, and the guard says he handed the case to a woman who showed him a letter signed by you.”

“Did you send anyone to collect a case from our old storage unit?” I asked Dario.

“No, and there’s something else. The woman left a message for you.”

“What message?”

“She said to ask Valentina Moretti why her mother was at the docks the night Nico died.”

I ended the call and turned toward Valentina

“I swear I didn’t know,” she said. “I never knew my mother had anything to do with your brother.”

I wanted to believe her, but before I could answer, my phone received a picture from an unknown number.

It showed two people standing outside the warehouse four years ago, shortly before Nico’s death.

One was my younger brother, the other was my mother, and on the back of the picture, someone had written a sentence that made the entire case look different.

Nico wasn’t meeting the Morettis that night. He was helping one of them escape.