Chapter 2 - At Nine O’Clock, the Mafia Boss Offered Her a Job—Then She Found Her Dead Mother’s Photograph
Rocco drove without asking for an address. That frightened Irene more than the gun beneath his jacket. When she gave him the cross street, he nodded as though confirming something he already knew. Her apartment occupied the third floor of a building whose front door never latched. She climbed the stairs listening for footsteps behind her. Nobody followed. That was almost worse.
Inside, she slid the bolt, took a biscuit tin from beneath the sink, and opened the false bottom. There were three things inside: a photograph of her mother standing beside a dark-haired man, a brass key, and a letter she had never dared finish reading. The letter began, If the wolves find you, remember that not every wolf hunts for the same reason.
She had spent five years pretending those words were nonsense. Her mother, Elena Corv, had died in a fire in Cleveland. The police called it an accident. Irene remembered a stranger watching the house burn, a stranger wearing a silver ring engraved with a black bird. She remembered her mother shouting her childhood name, Isabella, and pushing her through the basement window. She remembered the smell of gasoline.
At eight fifty-nine the next morning, she entered Vulpe Tower wearing the same black shoes she used for work. Rocco escorted her to a glass office high above the river. Aleandro stood beside the windows, holding the photograph she had left in the tin. Her stomach dropped.
"You broke into my home."
"I had it copied from an old family archive," he said. "I didn't enter your apartment. You can ask Rocco."
She studied the picture. The man beside her mother was younger than Aleandro, with the same watchful eyes.
"My father," Aleandro said. "He died eleven years ago."
"Why was he with my mother?"
"That's what I'm trying to learn."
She did not believe him. He could see it. Instead of ordering her to sit, he stepped away from the door and gave her room to leave. "I owe you an apology for last night. Threatening you was wrong. You don't owe me your life because you helped me keep mine."
The words surprised her enough that she looked at him again. He offered her a legitimate contract as a translator and cultural adviser, with a salary that could pay her brother's college fees and provide her the means to move. She could refuse. If she accepted, she would work with a lawyer of her choosing and no personal surveillance.
"Why do you need me?"
"Because someone deliberately mistranslated Salvatore's words. Peter was paid to make that meeting end in blood."
Aleandro slid a receipt across the desk. Peter had received a transfer from a company called Bellwether Holdings six hours before the dinner. Irene knew the name. She had seen it stamped on a shipping container in the photographs her mother hid.
"Your mother worked in freight accounting," Aleandro said. "Mine told me she saved my father's life once."
"Your father died."
"Yes. And she disappeared before anyone could tell me why."
A sharp knock interrupted them. Silas entered, holding a phone. "Peter's missing. His apartment was cleaned out overnight."
Aleandro's expression hardened. Irene felt the old instinct to run, but something held her there: not his power, but the possibility that her mother's death had finally acquired a witness.
She picked up the contract. "I'll read this with my own attorney. And you will never call me Bella again."
"What should I call you?"
May you like
"Irene. Until I decide whether you deserve the rest."
That evening she returned home to find the biscuit tin exactly where she had left it. But beneath her door lay a white envelope containing a single sentence in her mother's dialect: The girl who speaks is the girl who dies.
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