Chapter 7 - Secrets in the Cellar
“Breathe, Emma,” Luca commanded softly.
His face was level with mine. The harsh overhead sunlight caught the sharp angles of his jaw, softening the lethal fury that had governed him moments before. Up close, his dark eyes carried an intensity that made it difficult to obey his instruction.
“I’m breathing,” I managed to choke out, though my chest felt constricted by an invisible band of iron. “I’m fine, Mr. Moretti.”
“You almost died yesterday,” he said, his voice dropping into a register meant only for me. “If she had realized you knew what those pills were, you wouldn't have left that bedroom with two broken fingers. You would have left in a body bag.”
From behind him, Teresa’s voice sounded weary, cracked with age and sorrow. “She saved my life, Luca.”
Luca didn’t look back at his mother. His focus remained entirely locked on me. He reached out with his left hand, his long, calloused fingers gently wrapping around the fiberglass splint on my right wrist, anchoring me against the trembling that was wracking my shoulders.
“She did,” Luca murmured. “And a Moretti never forgets a debt.”
Dr. Evans arrived twenty minutes later, flanked by Marco.
The chief of surgery looked pale, his pristine grey suit rumpled, carrying a specialized chemical analysis kit that smelled of reagent alcohol and sulfur. He didn’t ask questions. In Luca Moretti’s world, survival was directly proportional to professional silence.
He spent ten minutes at the small writing desk, crushing half of the *V-20* tablet into a glass vial, adding three drops of a clear liquid, and holding it against a digital spectrometer.
When the device beeped, Evans looked up, his jaw set in grim certainty.
“Potassium cyanide mixed with a concentrated digitalis derivative,” Dr. Evans said quietly. “Micro-dosed. If Donna Teresa had ingested this, the digitalis would have accelerated her irregular rhythm within fifteen minutes. The cyanide would have caused acute cellular hypoxia, mimicking a massive myocardial infarction. Standard autopsy in an eighty-one-year-old cardiac patient would never have screened for it.”
Teresa let out a slow, trembling breath, clutching her rosary beads tighter.
Luca stood up from where he was kneeling beside me. The warmth vanished from his posture, replaced by that terrifying, immovable darkness.
“Where did she get it, Marco?” Luca asked.
Marco stepped forward, tossing a slim black leather binder onto the desk. “We pulled Isabella’s encrypted burner from the vanity before the guards took her down. She wasn't acting alone, Luca. She’s been in contact with Julian Ross.”
The name fell like a bomb inside the room.
Even Teresa gasped, her fingers tightening on the beads until her knuckles turned white. “Julian?”
Julian Ross was the head of the North Side syndicate—Luca’s fiercest rival in Chicago’s illicit transit network. For five years, a fragile, bloody peace had held along the river boundary, largely because Luca held the southern railyards and Ross couldn't move cargo without Luca’s clearance.
“Ross promised her protection,” Marco explained, his voice low and gravelly. “He convinced her that once Teresa was gone, you’d be emotionally compromised, vulnerable. If Isabella secured the Cassano shipping docks through the marriage, Ross was going to launch a takeover of the Calumet terminals from the north. Isabella wasn't just trying to get rid of Donna Teresa. She was selling you out from the inside.”
Luca stood completely motionless in the center of the room.
He looked at the digital spectrometer on the desk. Then he looked at the amber bottle of pills.
“Where is she?” Luca asked.
“Carriage house cellar,” Marco replied. “Dante is outside the door.”
Luca turned toward me.
“Stay with my mother,” he said. “Nobody enters this room without Marco’s clearance. Not the staff, not the doctors, nobody.”
“Luca,” I whispered, my heart leaping into my throat. The darkness in his face was so absolute, so terrifyingly lethal, that I instinctively reached out with my uninjured left hand, catching the cuff of his dark shirt.
He stopped.
He looked down at my hand gripping his sleeve.
In this house, nobody touched Luca Moretti without an invitation. Even his top lieutenants kept a respectful three paces of distance. But he didn't pull away. He looked up from my fingers to my eyes, his expression softening by an imperceptible fraction.
“Don't do something that can't be undone,” I pleaded softly. “Don't let them drag you down to their level.”
A faint, ghost of a smile touched the corner of his lips—bitter, dark, and utterly devoid of amusement.
“Emma,” he said, his voice a low vibration that seemed to bypass my ears and resonate straight in my chest. “I was born at their level. The only difference is, I don't pretend to be an angel.”
He gently uncurled my fingers from his cuff, squeezed my uninjured hand once with firm, reassuring pressure, and turned toward the door.
May you like
“Marco. Come with me.”
***
