Chapter 6 - THE MAFIA BOSS LEARNED HIS MOST TRUSTED ADVISER HAD SECRETLY BETRAYED HIS FAMILY—BUT WHEN THE MAID REVEALED WHAT SHE HAD SEEN IN THE GREENHOUSE, LUCA REALIZED THE CONSPIRACY WAS BIGGER THAN HE IMAGINED
The photograph had been taken less than three hours earlier.
Emma stared at it from the library sofa, her hands cold despite the fire. She had visited the rehabilitation college website that afternoon, but she had not left the estate. The image showed her outside the college entrance wearing the navy coat she had owned before coming to the Moretti mansion. She recognized the photograph. It had been posted on her social media page months ago, when she attended an open house.
“They didn't follow me today,” she said.
Luca looked up. “How can you be sure?”
“Because that coat is at my sister's apartment. The picture is old.”
Ortiz examined the print. “Someone wanted us to believe they had immediate access to you. That doesn't mean the threat is harmless.”
Emma nodded. Fear had a way of making old images feel like fresh danger. She was relieved to recognize the photograph, but not reassured by the person who had found it and printed it.
Miriam suggested that Emma temporarily stay with her sister under police protection. Emma considered it, then asked whether that would put Rachel and her children at greater risk. Ortiz arranged a patrol near Rachel's building and explained the options without promising absolute safety.
“I'll stay in the guest suite tonight,” Emma decided. “Tomorrow I want to give a complete statement. After that, I'll choose where to go.”
Luca said nothing until Ortiz left the room. Then he asked, “Are you afraid of me?”
Emma looked at him. “Sometimes.”
He absorbed the answer without flinching.
“Not because you threatened me,” she continued. “Because people around you think threats are normal. I need to know whether you're willing to change that.”
“I am.”
“Then keep showing me.”
He nodded. “I will.”
The next morning Emma met Ortiz in a quiet office off the main hall. She described the greenhouse accident from beginning to end. Vanessa had sent her to retrieve arrangements for the reception. Daniel Mercer had been working near the service door, supposedly checking the hinges. Emma had noticed him carrying a red-handled screwdriver and a roll of black tape. When she returned with the planters, the door's metal edge caught her leg. She fell against a broken ceramic pot, scraping her thigh. Daniel had disappeared. Vanessa arrived within minutes and ordered her to keep working.
“Did you see Daniel damage the door?” Ortiz asked.
“No,” Emma said. “I saw him working there. I saw the tools. And I saw him leave before I was hurt.”
“That's the distinction we need.”
Emma appreciated the detective's precision. She was tired of people turning what she knew into whatever story suited them. She wanted the truth to be strong enough to stand without exaggeration.
Ortiz asked whether anything else had seemed unusual. Emma closed her eyes and reconstructed the scene. The greenhouse smelled of damp soil and citrus. The orchid beds had been watered. A small radio played near the potting bench. Daniel had been speaking into his phone.
“He said, 'She won't find the second packet,'” Emma remembered. “I thought he meant a delivery.”
Ortiz wrote it down. “Anything else?”
“He said the old lady had hidden things in the wrong place.”
“Old lady?”
“That's what he said. I remember being angry because it sounded disrespectful.”
The detective leaned forward. “Did he name anyone?”
Emma searched her memory. “No. But he said something about the lakehouse account being emptied before Friday.”
Ortiz's pen stopped. “Lakehouse?”
“Yes. I didn't know there was a lakehouse.”
There was. Sofia had owned a small property near Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where she spent summers before her marriage. Luca had sold it years earlier—or believed he had. When Miriam checked the records, she discovered the property had been transferred to a holding company controlled by Adrian Voss. The transfer document carried Sofia's signature, dated six months after her death.
The forgery was not an isolated incident. It was a system.
By noon Ortiz had obtained a warrant to search the property. She asked Luca not to send his men ahead. He agreed, though Emma could see how much the restraint cost him.
The search found filing cabinets, a locked server, and records of payments to public officials. The property was empty, but fresh food in the refrigerator suggested someone had left in a hurry. In a desk drawer investigators found a draft statement blaming Luca for the East Harbor trust fraud. It included fabricated details about meetings he had never attended and a list of journalists who were supposed to receive it.
Miriam read the draft aloud in the library. “They planned to make you the public face of the scheme, then move the remaining money while you fought the allegations.”
Luca stared at the page. “Adrian managed the trust because my mother trusted him.”
“Your mother stopped trusting him,” Teresa said quietly. “That's why she hid the records.”
Emma watched Luca wrestle with grief and anger. He had spent years believing he understood the people closest to him. Now he was discovering that familiarity could be used as camouflage.
A second discovery made the situation worse. The lakehouse server contained correspondence with a redevelopment company that had purchased properties near the Chicago waterfront. Families had been promised replacement housing. Instead, many had been pushed into temporary accommodation while the land was resold at a profit. East Harbor money had helped finance the transactions.
Emma recognized one address. Her childhood friend, Jasmine Reed, had lived in an apartment building on that street. Jasmine's mother had been forced to move after the building was condemned. She had died the following winter, unable to afford the medical care she needed after the relocation.
“This isn't just about Sofia,” Emma said. “People were hurt while everyone argued about ownership.”
Luca looked at her. “I know.”
“Do you? Because if the investigation ends with you clearing your name and keeping the money, nothing changes for those families.”
His expression tightened, but he did not argue. “What do you want me to do?”
“Start by meeting them. Without cameras. Without bodyguards standing over their shoulders. Listen before you decide what they need.”
That afternoon Luca asked Miriam to establish an independent restitution committee with representatives from the affected neighborhoods. He pledged to place disputed profits in escrow until the court determined their lawful owners. The decision would cost him millions and might expose his companies to further investigation. He signed the documents anyway.
Emma heard about it from Teresa, not from Luca. That mattered to her. It suggested he was doing the work because it was necessary, not because he wanted applause.
In the days that followed, Emma's leg improved slowly. She began short walks in the garden with a cane, then without it for a few steps at a time. Luca sometimes joined her. He never asked her to move faster. When she grew tired, he sat beside her on a stone bench and talked about ordinary things: his mother's terrible singing, the dog he had owned as a child, the strange loneliness of living in a house too large for one person.
Emma told him about Rachel's children, her father's stubborn refusal to use a walker, and the first time she had helped a patient stand during volunteer work at a rehabilitation center. Luca listened as though these details mattered more than the price of the estate.
One evening he asked, “When this is over, will you leave?”
“I don't know,” she said. “I can't stay here as your employee and pretend nothing has changed.”
“I don't want you to feel obligated to stay.”
“Good. Because I won't.”
He smiled, a brief and unguarded expression that softened the scar above his eyebrow. “I believe you.”
Emma felt the pull between them. She also knew that a relationship built while she depended on his household for employment and safety would never feel entirely free. She needed her own income, her own home, and the chance to decide what she wanted without gratitude weighing on the answer.
“I've applied for a scholarship,” she told him. “If I get it, I want to start classes next fall.”
“Then I hope you get it.”
She searched his face. “That's all?”
“That's all. Unless you want me to help you practice for an interview.”
She laughed. “You'd be terrifying as an interviewer.”
“Then the real one will seem easy.”
For the first time since the greenhouse injury, Emma laughed without immediately looking over her shoulder.
The peace lasted until Friday.
At 6:30 p.m., Ortiz called Luca with news from the laboratory. The medication found in Sofia's room had been altered. Investigators could not yet determine whether it caused her death, but the results were consistent with a deliberate substitution. Dr. Vale had failed to document the change. His clinic had closed that morning, and he had left the city.
“Where's Adrian?” Luca asked.
“We're looking,” Ortiz replied. “We have warrants and federal assistance. But there's something else you need to know.”
The detective had found evidence that Daniel Mercer was not merely Adrian's subordinate. He had been receiving payments from Bellini Civic Strategies for years. Several transfers coincided with attempts to access Sofia's bedroom, the greenhouse, and the estate chapel. A separate account funded a private event company responsible for arranging the Moretti engagement celebration.
“Vanessa's engagement party,” Emma said.
“Exactly,” Ortiz replied. “We believe they planned to use the event to distract security while moving records out of the estate.”
Luca's jaw tightened. “And Emma's injury?”
“Possibly part of the same plan. If she was dismissed or forced to leave, there would be one fewer person familiar with the greenhouse and Sofia's routines.”
Emma sat very still. The injury that had seemed like one woman's cruelty was connected to a larger effort to erase evidence. Vanessa had not simply been jealous of a maid. She had been trying to remove a witness she considered disposable.
Ortiz added that Senator Bellini had scheduled an emergency press conference for the following morning. He intended to accuse Luca of obstructing a charitable investigation and announce a new fundraising gala to “restore public trust.”
“Where?” Miriam asked.
“At the Bellini Grand Hotel.”
Teresa's face changed. “That's where Sofia first announced the East Harbor trust.”
Emma understood the symbolism. Bellini wanted to reclaim the story before the evidence reached the public. He wanted the city to remember him as a philanthropist, not a man who had profited from families losing their homes.
Luca turned to Miriam. “We release verified records to the investigators and let them decide what can be made public.”
“And the gala?” she asked.
“We don't go.”
Emma looked at him. “Not even to confront them?”
“No. They want a spectacle. I'm finished giving them one.”
She was proud of that answer. It was not the answer the old Luca would have given.
Then her phone rang.
The number was blocked. She almost ignored it, but a second call came immediately. Ortiz gestured for her to put it on speaker.
A woman's voice whispered, “Emma? It's Mrs. Alvarez.”
The retired housekeeper sounded terrified. She said someone had followed her from the grocery store. She had received a photograph of her grandson outside his school. She wanted to withdraw her statement.
“Where are you?” Ortiz asked.
“At home. But they know where I live.”
The detective began arranging protection. Before she could finish, Mrs. Alvarez said something that made Emma's stomach turn.
“There's another letter. Sofia gave it to me the week before she died. I didn't tell anyone because she made me promise not to open it unless Luca was in danger. It names the person who ordered the medicine changed.”
“Keep it safe,” Ortiz said. “Officers are coming.”
“I can't,” Mrs. Alvarez whispered. “Someone is at the door.”
A heavy knock sounded through the phone. Then a man's voice called from the other side, polite and familiar.
“Mrs. Alvarez? It's Daniel Mercer. Mr. Moretti sent me to collect the letter.”
Luca's face drained of color.
“No,” he said into the speaker. “I did not.”
The line went dead.
Emma looked at Ortiz. “We have to help her.”
“We are,” the detective said, already speaking into her radio.
Minutes passed. Luca paced the room. Teresa held Emma's hand. Outside, the evening sky darkened over the gardens, and the mansion's golden lights came on one by one.
At last Ortiz's phone rang. She listened, then closed her eyes for a moment.
“Mrs. Alvarez is alive,” she said. “Officers reached the house before Mercer got inside. He fled.”
Relief swept through the room.
“But the letter is missing,” Ortiz continued. “Someone entered the house earlier today and took it from the hiding place she described.”
Emma felt the familiar chill of a puzzle revealing a deeper layer. If the letter had been stolen before Daniel arrived, someone else was moving ahead of him. Someone with access to the witness's home, someone who knew about Sofia's instructions.
A message appeared on Emma's phone from an unknown number. It contained a photograph of a cream-colored envelope resting on a black velvet chair.
Beneath the image were six words.
COME TO THE ENGAGEMENT GALA ALONE.
A second message followed.
May you like
OR THE NEXT WITNESS WILL DIE.
TITLE: “WALK PROPERLY, YOU USELESS MAID!”—THE MAFIA BOSS'S FIANCÉE FORCED A BLEEDING HOUSEMAID TO SERVE TWENTY-THREE WEALTHY GUESTS, BUT WHEN THE TATTOOED KING ASKED WHO MADE HER WORK THROUGH THE PAIN, THE ENTIRE MANSION WENT SILENT
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