Chapter 3 - The Taste of Gold
The dining room had descended into a loud, drunken celebration by the time the double doors of the private wing swung open.
At the head of the banquet table, beneath a massive crystal chandelier that cast dancing prisms across the room, Vanessa Bellini stood with a silver cake knife in her hand. Her red silk gown clung to her hourglass frame, her diamond earrings swinging as she laughed at something whispered by her father, Vincent Bellini—a thick-necked, silver-haired man whose bespoke tuxedo could not hide the ruthless street enforcer he had been thirty years ago.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” Vincent Bellini boomed, tapping his crystal champagne flute with a butter knife. “To my daughter, Vanessa, and to the future of the Moretti and Bellini empires! May their union be as unbreakable as concrete!”
The room erupted into applause. Glasses clinked. Laughter bubbled up like boiling water.
Then Luca walked back in.
The room didn't fall silent all at once; it withered from the doorway inward, like grass under a sudden freeze.
Luca moved with an unhurried, predatory momentum, his hands resting casually in his trouser pockets, his dark hair catching the light. He was smiling—a thin, polite, razor-sharp smile that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
And walking two paces behind his left shoulder, dressed in a blood-stained uniform with my lip swollen and purple, was me.
Vanessa’s laughter died in her throat. The silver cake knife in her hand wavered, the blade clattering against the porcelain rim of the serving platter. Her eyes darted from Luca’s face to mine, and in that split second, I saw the raw, naked terror flash across her pupils before she managed to paste on her radiant society mask.
“Darling!” Vanessa purred, stepping forward from the table, her red silk train sweeping the marble. “We were beginning to think you’d abandoned your own celebration! Father was just about to cut the first slice for our guests.”
Luca didn't look at the cake. He didn't look at her father. He stopped three feet from her, his gray eyes sweeping over her face with the detached curiosity of a scientist studying a venomous insect beneath a microscope.
“I was delayed, Vanessa,” Luca said smoothly. His voice carried effortlessly across the silent room. “Samuel Bennett had an interesting story to tell me.”
The name fell onto the table like a slab of cold meat.
Vincent Bellini’s smile vanished. The older mobster slowly set his champagne flute down on the white linen, his eyes narrowing into cold slits as he looked at his daughter.
Vanessa’s chest hitched. Her smile became brittle, stretched so tight over her porcelain veneers that it looked painful. “Samuel? Oh, darling, that poor old man is senile. I told you, he’s been wandering around the parish for years muttering nonsense. You shouldn't have troubled yourself with him during our dinner.”
“He wasn't muttering nonsense, Vanessa,” Luca murmured, taking half a step closer. “He was reminiscing. He remembered the music he played at my mother’s funeral. And he remembered the conversation you had with her three weeks before she died.”
A heavy, suffocating silence gripped the room.
Guests who had been laughing seconds earlier began shifting uncomfortably in their seats. Judge Callahan cleared his throat, staring down at his dessert plate. Nobody moved. Nobody breathed.
“Luca, please,” Vanessa laughed nervously, reaching out to touch his lapel with her manicured fingers. “Whatever that old man said to you, it’s ridiculous. You know how people get when they lose their faculties. Let’s not ruin our evening in front of our friends—”
Luca reached up.
He didn't swat her hand away. He gently caught her wrist between his thumb and forefinger.
He didn't squeeze, but the deliberate, iron stillness of his grip made Vanessa freeze mid-breath. Her eyes widened as Luca slowly, methodically lifted her hand away from his chest.
“He told me you asked my mother about Michael’s car,” Luca said.
His voice wasn't raised. It was conversational, intimate, almost sweet.
“He told me you wanted to know if the police had ever pulled it from the water. And when my mother said no... you told her there was still time to move it.”
Every drop of color drained from Vanessa’s face.
She didn't gasp. She didn't scream. She simply turned the shade of damp chalk beneath her expensive foundation.
Her father, Vincent, slammed his heavy palms onto the table, standing up so violently that his chair screeched against the marble floor.
“That’s enough, Moretti!” Vincent Bellini barked, his face mottled with purple rage. “You don't interrogate my daughter like a common criminal in front of the city’s elite! If you have doubts about this marriage, you speak to me in private like a man!”
Luca slowly turned his head to look at the older boss.
The smile on Luca’s face disappeared.
What remained was an abyss.
“Sit down, Vincent,” Luca whispered.
The two words carried so much lethal, unadulterated weight that the elder Bellini actually hesitated. His chest heaved beneath his tuxedo, his hands clenching into fists, but beneath the bluster, I saw the flicker of ancient, instinctual fear in the old man's eyes.
Luca turned back to Vanessa.
With his free hand, he reached into his inner breast pocket. He pulled out the black-and-white photograph from the diner and laid it flat on the table, right beside the four-tiered engagement cake.
“Nine years ago, Vanessa,” Luca murmured, tapping the glass-like surface of the print. “The night my brother disappeared, you told the detectives you were in Miami with your college roommates. You swore an affidavit. You cried on my shoulder at his memorial service and told me how tragic it was that you had never gotten to meet him.”
He leaned down until his lips were two inches from her ear.
“Why were you standing outside a diner on Route 66 with my brother’s arm around your waist three hours before he vanished into the dark?”
Vanessa stared at the photograph. Her lips parted, trembling violently. A single tear broke through her mascara, carving a dark, ugly line down her cheek.
“Luca... please...” she whimpered, her voice cracking into a high, pathetic register. “It wasn't what you think... he came to me... Michael came to me because—”
“Where is the car, Vanessa?” Luca interrupted, his voice dropping into a register that made the crystal pendants on the chandelier faintly vibrate.
She couldn't speak. She could only shake her head, her breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps.
Luca released her wrist. He stepped back, pulling a white linen handkerchief from his pocket and slowly wiping his fingers, as if he had just touched something rotting in a gutter.
He looked around the table at the twenty-eight guests frozen in terror.
“The dinner is over,” Luca announced quietly. “My drivers will see you to your vehicles. If anyone speaks a single word of what transpired in this room before sunrise... I will consider it an act of war against the Moretti family.”
Nobody waited for a second invitation.
Within ninety seconds, the dining room emptied in a frantic, undignified scramble of fur coats, clattering silverware, and muttered excuses.
Only Vincent Bellini remained standing at the far end of the table, his hand resting inside his tuxedo jacket near his armpit, watching Luca with eyes burning with murderous desperation.
“You’ve made a fatal mistake tonight, boy,” Vincent Bellini hissed. “You think you can tear down my family over an old ghost and a senile organist?”
Luca didn't reach for a weapon. He didn't even look at the older man.
He walked over to where I stood near the doorway, took my elbow with an unyielding, protective firmness, and guided me toward the private hall.
“Daniel,” Luca called out into the quiet.
May you like
Daniel stepped through the arched entrance, holding a high-caliber automatic rifle across his chest, four armed men flanking him in tactical gear.
“Take Miss Bellini to the wine cellar,” Luca commanded, not looking back. “Strip her of her jewelry, her phone, and her shoes. And tell Marco Bellini down at the Calumet docks that if he tries to leave Cook County tonight... he will join his sister in the dark.”
