Haz shot forward, fists slamming into my chest. I caught the wrist of his injured hand, not wanting him to rip the stitches. But I let his other free, allowing him to hit me again and again.
“It’s a lie!” he said between punches. “There’s no way my father is—was—head of the most powerful mob in this town.”
“I wish I was wrong,” I told him, cradling his injured hand to my chest.
Haz sagged into me, and I wrapped my arm around him, accepting all his weight. “It’s a lie,” he said weakly.
I gestured, and Ghost came around, offering the folder. “It’s all here,” he said.
Haz sniffled and turned his face. “What is that?”
“It’s all there. Proof that you are the illegitimate and only child of Matteo Salvatore,” I told him.
Haz pushed out of my hold and took the folder, opening it immediately. As we all stood there, the only sound in the entire apartment was the rustling of papers. I kept my eyes trained on Haz, taking in every expression and the slight tremble in his hands.
He turned another page and jolted. A small card fell from the folder and fluttered to his feet. “These are mine,” he said, glancing up at me before quickly turning back to lift a sheet of paper. “This is my birth certificate. My papers from the state when I turned eighteen.” He bent down. “My social security card.”
Walking over to the coffee table, he lowered to his knees and then gingerly lined it all up across the surface. “This is the stuff those men took from my apartment,” he said. Then, in a whisper, he added, “My identity.”
“There’s a letter in there,” I said, wanting to hurry this along. Not for me but him. The sooner he had all the information, the sooner he could start to process it. “It’s from your birth mother.”
He made a sound and started scouring through the papers he’d yet to see. Before getting to the handwritten letter, he saw the DNA test. Grabbing it, he shot to his feet. “There’s a DNA test?”
“When Salvatore found you, he had a test run to see if it was true. Probably wanted to confirm before introducing himself.”
“This isn’t mine.” Haz was sure, glancing at the paper. “I never consented to a DNA test. I never gave a DNA sample.”
“There are ways to get samples without a person’s knowledge,” I explained.
“How?” Haz asked.
I couldn’t help but think back to earlier when he’d told me about his lost hairbrush. “For example, hair.”
His head snapped up. “You mean I didn’t lose my brush. Matteo Salvatore stole it?”
“Easiest way to see if you matched without causing a scene.”
Hazard stared at the paper. “It says it’s a match.”
I nodded.
“We don’t know if it was mine,” he argued.
“The letter.” I reminded him. “Apparently, your mother wrote him a letter about a year ago, telling him that she gave birth to his son but was too afraid to come forward. I guess your father wasn’t very nice to her, and when she found out she was pregnant, she hid it from everyone. And when she had her baby, she abandoned it at a hospital and left town.”
Haz’s breathing was heavy and uneven. The way his chest rose and fell made me want to both hit something and wrap him up and comfort him. The handwritten letter was the last thing in the folder, and when he lifted it out, the yellow file fell to the floor. He scanned the letter, which didn’t even fill the entire length of the front of the page. He couldn’t have read it all before looking up, eyes so overfull with tears that I wondered if he could see.
The paper crinkled in his hand when he made a fist. “They stole my DNA, then came back later to steal my identity, all because of a letter some woman wrote on her deathbed?”
The letter did say she was dying.
“Matteo planned to reach out to you. He, ah, wanted a relationship. It appears that he made changes to his will that made you a direct heir to everything he had,” I explained, eyes going to the other documents on the tabletop.
“No.” He denied it. “No way.”
“Nicholas Grimaldi must have learned about it, or maybe Matteo told him. It made him angry, and he murdered your father before he could tell anyone else about his heir. And now he wants to kill you too so you have no claim to the Salvatore dynasty and Grimaldi can take over like he always wanted.”
Haz tossed the crumpled letter onto the coffee table and shook his head. “This isn’t the kind of gossip I wanted, Kieran.”
