Chapter 2 - The Amber Ring
The bedroom felt like it had been dropped into an ice bath.
My bedroom in the south wing of Villa Moretti was built like a panic room wrapped in Italian velvet. Soundproof plaster three inches thick, custom triple-glazed security windows looking out over the private hills of Bedford, New York, and an electronic lock on the mahogany door that only responded to three biometric fingerprints: mine, my head of security Leo, and Mrs. Ricci, who came in at sunrise to set fresh linen.
Yet an eight-pound toddler clutching a worn gray rabbit had just described a visitor who had no business being on this floor.
“Say it again, Lily,” I whispered. My voice sounded stripped of everything—no gravel, no boardroom threat, just raw bone. “Look at me. Describe what you saw.”
Lily squeezed the rabbit’s remaining ear, burying her chin into its faded plush fur. Her dark curls brushed against the cream Egyptian cotton duvet. Her big brown eyes—unnervingly perceptive for someone barely thirty-six months on this earth—flicked toward the dark threshold of the corridor.
“The lady with the shiny red shoes,” Lily murmured, her tiny voice barely louder than the hum of the HVAC vent. “She smells like cold smoke and church flowers. She stands right there by your big mirror, Mr. Moretti. When your eyes get heavy and your breathing goes whoosh... whoosh... she walks to the little table where your water is.”
My pulse didn't race; it stopped.
Cold smoke and church flowers.
Clove cigarettes and white lilies.
There was only one woman in the state of New York who wore that exact custom perfume, imported directly from a private boutique on Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris.
Julianna.
My late brother Marco’s widow. The woman who sat at the head of the Moretti Charitable Foundation, the woman who had cried harder than anyone at Marco’s funeral three years ago, the woman who lived in the east wing of this very estate and personally managed the domestic staff.
“What does she do at the table, Lily?” I asked, forcing my hand to remain flat and open on the mattress so I wouldn't terrify the child. Every instinct in my body screamed to jump up, tear through the east wing, and drag answers out of the dark, but if I startled Lily now, her three-year-old memory would shut like a clam.
Lily pointed a small, sticky index finger toward the nightstand.
Resting on the dark walnut surface was a crystal carafe of mountain spring water and a lowball glass. Beside it sat the small porcelain dish holding the night’s prescribed dose of eszopiclone—the heavy-duty hypnotic sedative prescribed by Dr. Peter Vance, the private neurologist who had been charging the Moretti estate eighty thousand dollars a quarter to cure my “neurological exhaustion.”
“She touches the cup with her shiny ring,” Lily said simply. “The big brown stone ring that makes a click sound against the glass. Tink. Then she looks at you until you move your head, and then she walks away backwards so she doesn't make the floor creak.”
My breath caught like broken glass in my throat.
Julianna’s right hand had never been without that ring. An oval cabochon of raw Baltic amber set in hammered black gold—an heirloom given to her by Marco on their wedding day. The setting was hollowed out underneath, an antique poison ring Marco had purchased at an auction in Venice twenty years ago as a morbid romantic joke.
It clicks against the glass.
For thirty-six months, my life had devolved into an unrecognizable waking nightmare.
It had started two weeks after Marco’s car plunged off the Tappan Zee Bridge during a sudden winter storm. At first, the doctors called it acute bereavement syndrome. Then intractable insomnia. Then rapid-onset sensory hyperarousal. My brain refused to cross the threshold into REM sleep. Whenever my eyelids drifted closed, my heart would suddenly spike to one hundred and sixty beats per minute, cold sweat would drench my sheets, and violent, terrifying auditory hallucinations would yank me back into consciousness gasping for air.
I thought I was losing my mind.
I thought the guilt of surviving while Marco died had broken my nervous system.
Over three years, the insomnia had hollowed me out. I lost thirty pounds. My temper had become erratic, volatile enough that the board of Moretti Maritime and our allied business partners in the city had begun openly questioning whether Gabriel Moretti was still fit to hold the reins of the family empire. Two weeks ago, my uncle Silvio had gently suggested at Sunday dinner that perhaps I should step down as chairman and transfer executive power of the shipping lines to Julianna, who had shown “such remarkable poise and clearheaded stability” since Marco’s passing.
Maybe someone had never wanted me to recover.
The realization didn't come with anger. It came with the absolute, chilling clarity of a man who realizes he has been sitting in a room with an executioner for three years while thanking them for bringing him water.
The floorboard in the outer gallery gave a faint, rhythmic creak.
Lily’s eyes went round. She stiffened, pressing her small back hard against my ribs.
“Mr. Moretti,” she whispered, her lip trembling. “The red shoes.”
I didn't hesitate. I slid an arm around Lily, lifted her off the bed without a sound, and set her behind the heavy velvet curtain covering the dressing alcove.
“Stay there, Lily,” I whispered directly into her ear, my tone firm, low, and unbreakable. “Close your eyes and count your rabbit’s ears. Do not make a sound until I tell you.”
She nodded once, terrified but obedient, pulling the cloth around her yellow pajamas.
I turned back to the bed, pulled the duvet up to my chest, let my head fall back against the pillows, and closed my eyes halfway—leaving a sliver of vision through my eyelashes aimed straight at the open doorway.
Ten seconds passed in suffocating silence.
Then came the scent. Faint at first, drifting on the draft of the hallway: bitter clove smoke, followed by the heavy, cloying sweetness of fresh white lilies.
A shadow fell across the bedroom floor.
May you like
A woman stepped into the ambient glow of the city lights filtering through the sheer curtains.
She wore a charcoal silk dressing gown that swept the carpet without a whisper. Her dark hair was pinned up loosely. On her feet were crimson velvet slippers. And as she raised her right hand toward the crystal carafe on my nightstand, the streetlights outside caught the oily, golden flash of a large amber ring.
