Chapter 2 - The Cold Room Beneath the Music
The air in Luca Moretti’s study did not merely cool; it calcified.
Outside the floor-to-ceiling mahogany double doors, the muffled laughter of twenty-eight high-society guests and the faint tinkling of crystal flutes continued unabated. Downstairs, thirty thousand dollars worth of imported champagne flowed, and an enormous four-tiered engagement cake frosted in edible gold leaf stood waiting beside the grand dining room hearth. But inside this room, bathed only in the amber glow of the fireplace and the green-shaded banker’s lamp on the desk, the world had come to an absolute, suffocating halt.
Luca did not blink. His hand remained suspended over the little plastic recorder, his knuckles white, his thumb pressed against the plastic casing so hard the small seam groaned.
On the desk lay the black-and-white print. Michael Moretti—twenty-one years old, with the same sharp Sicilian cheekbones as Luca, but possessing their mother’s soft, trusting eyes—stood grinning in a faded leather bomber jacket outside a neon-lit diner on Route 66. And right beside him, leaning into his shoulder with her fingers tucked into the belt loop of his jeans, was Vanessa Bellini.
Not the polished, diamond-draped debutante currently presiding over a dining room downstairs. This was Vanessa nine years earlier: twenty-three, wearing a faded baseball cap pulled low, dark eyeliner smudged, her lips curved into a calculating smirk that Luca had foolishly mistaken for devotion over the last two years.
“Good. Then there’s still time to move it.”
The words from Samuel Bennett’s recording seemed to hover in the air like toxic smoke.
“Luca,” Samuel whispered. The blind old man’s hands were trembling against the worn knees of his trousers. His milky, unseeing eyes drifted toward the direction of the desk, guided only by the sound of the younger man’s ragged, shallow breathing. “Your mother held that photograph every day of the last week of her life. She wept until she had no tears left. She told me, ‘Samuel, if I tell Luca now, while he is mourning his father, he will burn Chicago to the ground. But if I say nothing, that viper will wrap herself around his throat.’”
Luca slowly lowered his hand from the recorder. He picked up the photograph by its edges, treating the brittle paper as if it were coated in arsenic.
“Michael’s car,” Luca rasped. His voice was unrecognizable—a gravelly, terrifying rumble stripped of every polite veneer. “The Chicago Police found his jacket in an alley behind the navy pier three days after he vanished. They told us the current took him out into Lake Michigan. They told my mother the vehicle was likely stripped and crushed in Gary within forty-eight hours.”
“They lied to you, son,” Samuel said softly, a tear carving a path through the deep wrinkles of his weathered cheek. “Or someone paid them to stop looking.”
Luca’s gaze lifted from the paper and locked onto me.
I was still sitting on the leather sofa near the hearth, the melting ice wrapped in a linen napkin pressed against my swollen lip. Every pulse of my heartbeat sent a sharp, hot throb through my jaw, but the physical pain was entirely obliterated by the ice spreading through my chest.
For eleven months, I had been an invisible fixture in this mansion. I had dusted the baseboards of the grand ballroom, polished the antique silverware until my thumbs were raw, and stepped into recessed doorways whenever Luca Moretti walked past flanked by men in tailored suits with shoulder holsters. I had watched Vanessa treat the staff like vermin, watched her spend thirty thousand dollars on a single shopping trip to Michigan Avenue while my father rationed his heart medication in our cramped apartment in Bridgeport.
I knew Vanessa was cruel. I knew she was petty.
I had never imagined she was a grave-keeper.
“Emily,” Luca said.
My name on his lips was quiet, but it vibrated with an authority that made my spine go rigid.
“Yes, Mr. Moretti?”
“When she shoved you at the chapel,” he said, his gray eyes pinning me to the cushions with an intensity that made the breath catch in my throat, “what did she say to Samuel before you intervened?”
I swallowed, the coppery taste of blood still sharp on my tongue. “She didn't know I was standing behind the altar partition, sir. I was replacing the votive candles for Saturday's rehearsal. Mr. Bennett had just walked in through the side garden door using his cane. When Vanessa saw him holding that black case, she didn't sound angry at first. She sounded... panicked.”
“Exact words, Emily,” Luca commanded, stepping around the massive desk, his tall frame looming over the firelight. “Give me every syllable.”
“She said, ‘I told you to stay in Indiana, you senile old fool.’” My voice trembled slightly, but I forced myself to meet his piercing stare. “And Mr. Bennett said, ‘Isabella’s soul deserves peace, Vanessa. You took her boy's life, you won't take his memory.’ That was when she grabbed his arm. She tried to wrench the strap over his head. Mr. Bennett stumbled against the font, and I ran out. I told her to take her hands off him. She turned around, looked at my uniform, and said, ‘You just signed your own death warrant, you little peasant.’ Then she threw her weight against the heavy oak door. The iron latch caught my mouth.”
Luca didn't curse. He didn't smash the glass on his desk.
He simply stood there, six feet two inches of tailored black wool and cold, predatory rage, his chest rising and falling with an unnatural, terrifying rhythm.
A soft, discreet knock sounded at the study door.
“Enter,” Luca murmured.
Daniel, his chief of security—a broad-shouldered man with a scar slicing through his left eyebrow and hands that looked like sledgehammers—slipped into the room. He took in the scene in an instant: the blind organist clutching his case, the bloody napkin in my hand, and the photograph resting beside the digital recorder.
“Boss,” Daniel said, his voice clipped. “The guests are asking for you. Commissioner Russo and Judge Callahan are preparing to leave, and Miss Bellini is getting frantic. She told the kitchen to start slicing the cake without you.”
Luca didn't look at his security chief. He kept his eyes fixed on the photograph of his dead younger brother.
“Daniel,” Luca said, his tone deathly calm. “Where is Vincent Bellini tonight?”
“Vanessa’s father is at the head table, boss,” Daniel replied, frowning slightly. “Sitting between the Alderman and the Port Authority director. Drinking your nineteen-eighty-two Barolo.”
“And her brother? Marco Bellini?”
“Down at their private freight terminal on the Calumet River. Superintending the late cargo arrivals.”
Luca picked up the photograph and slid it into the breast pocket of his suit jacket, right over his heart. Then he picked up the small recorder and handed it to Daniel.
“Take Samuel to the safe house on Division Street,” Luca ordered. “Put four armed men on the perimeter. If anyone approaches that gate without my personal voice authorization—including members of the Bellini family—put them in the ground.”
Daniel’s jaw tightened. He looked at the recorder, then at Samuel, realizing the gravity of the shift. “Understood, boss. And the girl?”
Luca turned his head slowly, his gaze sweeping over my bruised face, down to the white collar of my uniform stained with dried crimson droplets.
“Emily stays with me,” Luca said softly.
My heart hammered against my ribs. “Mr. Moretti, I... my shift is over. I can take the bus back to Bridgeport. My father is waiting for his prescriptions—”
“Your father’s medication was delivered to his front door twenty minutes ago by my personal driver, Emily,” Luca interrupted, taking a step toward the sofa until his polished dress shoes were inches from my worn flats. “Along with an envelope containing five thousand dollars in cash to cover your family's expenses for the next six months.”
I stared at him, my mouth slightly open, the cold compress slipping an inch from my lip. “Why?”
Luca reached down. His fingers, warm and calloused, gently caught my wrist, lifting my hand away from my face so he could inspect the split skin of my lower lip under the lamplight. The tenderness in his touch was so completely at odds with the murderous darkness rolling off his shoulders that a shiver ran down my spine.
“Because in a house filled with twenty-eight of the most powerful people in this state,” Luca whispered, his thumb lightly grazing the curve of my swollen jaw, “you were the only person who stood between an old man and a monster. In my world, Emily, loyalty like that is not rewarded with an hourly wage. It is rewarded with blood.”
May you like
He released my hand, turning toward the double doors.
“Wipe your face, Emily,” Luca commanded, his voice dropping into that chilling, ancient cadence of an underworld king preparing to pass sentence. “We have an engagement party to finish.”
