Chapter 2 - THE MAFIA BOSS FOUND A SECOND BROKEN SEAL—AND HIS FUTURE BROTHER-IN-LAW COULD NO LONGER EXPLAIN THE MISSING MINUTES
By morning, the photograph had been traced to a prepaid phone, and I had learned how frightening protection could feel.
Two men stood outside my apartment building. They wore ordinary coats and carried coffee cups, but they watched every car that slowed at the curb. Dante’s security chief said they were there to keep me safe. My neighbors saw them and began whispering that I was in trouble with the mob. Both things could be true.
My shoulder ached whenever I lifted my arm. I had barely slept. Every time I closed my eyes I heard the crack of the crop and the strange silence afterward, the silence of two hundred people deciding that a maid’s pain was not worth interrupting their evening.
At nine, Marco called. “The detective wants a follow-up statement. Mr. Moretti asked me to drive you.”
“I can get there myself.”
“You can. But someone photographed you from a restricted corridor and sent a threat. I’d prefer you didn’t travel alone.”
“Is that a request?”
“Yes.”
His answer mattered. I had grown accustomed to people in the Moretti house turning requests into orders. I agreed to the ride, on the condition that I could leave whenever I wanted.
At the police station, Detective Naomi Reyes asked me to describe the puncture. I drew a rough circle on a sheet of paper and marked the position where the wax had been disturbed. She asked whether I had touched the opening. I said no. She asked whether I had tasted the wine. Again, no.
“You did the right thing,” she said. “But you were lucky you weren’t badly hurt.”
“I didn’t have time to be clever.”
“Sometimes that’s the difference between a witness and a victim.”
Reyes told me the initial screening had identified an unidentified contaminant inconsistent with the wine’s normal composition. More tests were needed before anyone could say what it was or whether it was intended to kill. She was careful with every word. I appreciated that. In the Moretti mansion, people often treated suspicions as verdicts if the person making them had enough money.
She also told me the service station camera had been disabled for eleven minutes before the bottle was collected. A maintenance request had been filed under a false employee code. The person who entered it knew the household system.
“Whoever planned this,” she said, “understood the house.”
When I returned to the mansion to collect my personal belongings, the staff entrance felt different. The other employees looked away, not because they disliked me, but because they were afraid of being seen talking to me. A cook named Rosa slipped me a container of soup and squeezed my good hand.
“Your mother would be proud,” she whispered.
I swallowed. “I hope so.”
The head steward, Leonard Vale, stood near the elevator. He had supervised the cellar for twenty years and knew every bottle by its label. His face was composed, but he kept smoothing the cuffs of his jacket.
“Miss Brooks,” he said, “I understand you’re on leave.”
“Doctor’s orders.”
“Such an unfortunate spectacle.”
“The assault, you mean?”
His eyes flickered. “The entire evening.”
I watched him walk away and remembered that he had signed the inventory ledger on the day the Bordeaux arrived. His signature appeared on the page just above a notation written in different ink: SPECIAL PRESENTATION—STERLING FAMILY.
Dante had established a temporary office in the library. Marco brought me there after I asked to speak with him. The room smelled of old leather and rain. Dante stood by the window with his sleeves rolled up. There were dark shadows beneath his eyes.
“Did you sleep?” I asked before I could stop myself.
“No.” He gestured to a chair. “Neither did you.”
I sat. “I remembered something about the shipment. The wine arrived three weeks ago, but the private service order was entered only yesterday.”
“Who entered it?”
“Leonard Vale approved the inventory. The service order carried Adrian Sterling’s initials.”
Dante opened a folder. “Adrian says he gave the bottle as an engagement gift. He claims he never handled it after delivery.”
“Then why did he tell the waiter to send it upstairs?”
“He says he wanted me to enjoy it before the auction.”
“Convenient.”
Dante looked up. “You don’t have to soften your opinion for me.”
“Good, because I don’t think your future brother-in-law is telling the truth.”
For a second, he almost smiled. Then the expression disappeared.
“My father used to say the Sterlings were loyal allies,” he said. “I built a business arrangement around that belief.”
“Your father was Vittorio Moretti.”
He nodded. “You knew him?”
“No. I knew of him.”
I could have told him everything then. I could have said that my father had worked for a company connected to Vittorio and vanished after questioning a shipment. But the memory of my mother begging me not to trust the Morettis stopped the words in my throat.
Dante studied me. “There’s something you’re not saying.”
“There are many things I don’t say at work.”
“Fair enough.”
He placed a photocopy on the table. It was the service order. Beside Adrian’s initials was a second approval mark: LV. Leonard Vale.
“Someone bypassed the ordinary chain of custody,” Dante said. “The police are examining the records. I want you to tell them everything you remember, even if it implicates my staff.”
“I will.”
“Even if it implicates me.”
I looked at him then. “Would you really want that?”
“Yes.”
I was beginning to understand that Dante could be frightening without lying. That did not make him innocent. It made him harder to categorize.
The investigation became public before lunch. A gossip website posted a blurred photograph of my bandaged shoulder and called me THE MAID WHO RUINED THE MORETTI WEDDING. Another site claimed I had attacked Camila. By afternoon, my landlord had left a voicemail asking whether police would be coming to the building.
Camila went on television in a cream suit, her eyes shining with practiced tears. She said the gala had been a beautiful evening ruined by a troubled employee. She said she regretted any misunderstanding but insisted that I had behaved erratically. She never mentioned the riding crop. She never mentioned my blood.
I watched the interview from my kitchen table while eating Rosa’s soup. Then I turned it off and called Detective Reyes.
“I want the assault footage released if it’s legally possible,” I said.
“That’s a decision for the investigation and the people who own the footage,” she replied. “But your statement is on record. We’re not treating you as the aggressor.”
An hour later, Dante called me directly.
“I saw the interview,” he said.
“So did half of Chicago.”
“My lawyers are sending the original security footage to the police. They’re also preserving the complete recording for any proceedings.”
“Are you going to defend Camila?”
“No.”
A silence followed. I heard someone speaking in his office and the click of a door closing.
“I have postponed the wedding,” he said.
My hand tightened around the phone. “Because of the wine?”
“Because I watched the woman I planned to marry hurt an employee who was already injured. Even if the bottle had been an ordinary accident, that would have been enough.”
I looked at my bandage. “You should have known what she was like before last night.”
“You’re right.”
I had not expected him to agree.
That evening, Detective Reyes obtained a warrant for the service corridor recordings. The cameras nearest the wine rack had gone dark, but another camera caught Adrian entering the service elevator at 9:11. He emerged at 9:19 carrying nothing. At 9:21, Leonard Vale passed the same doorway with a covered tray. The waiter collected the bottle at 9:24.
The timeline left five minutes that neither man could explain.
Dante called a meeting with Marco and his attorney. I was invited to provide context, not ordered to attend. I went because I remembered the old cellar records room and the angle of the threatening photograph.
“There’s a door behind the service station,” I told them. “It leads to the archived ledgers. It was sealed years ago, but the photograph could only have been taken from that passage.”
Marco frowned. “We checked that corridor. The lock looked untouched.”
“Then someone has a key.”
“Who?” Dante asked.
“Leonard,” I said. “He has every cellar key. And possibly Adrian, if Leonard gave him one.”
Dante asked Marco to secure the corridor for police inspection. No one was to enter alone. I was relieved. I had spent four months wanting to get inside that room; now I understood how dangerous it might be.
During the ride back from the police station, Marco asked whether I wanted the guards moved farther from my building. I looked out at the row of laundromats and corner stores where I had lived for six years. "My neighbors already think I've joined a criminal conspiracy," I said. He gave a short, unexpected laugh. "Most of them probably think you're dating somebody dangerous." I stared at him until he raised a hand in surrender. "Bad joke. Sorry." It was the first time I had seen him act like a person rather than a locked door in a black suit.
I told him I wanted one thing: my ordinary life back. I wanted to take the bus without looking over my shoulder. I wanted to buy coffee without wondering who had sent the threat. I wanted to return to work and catalog bottles that would never be opened. Marco listened without interrupting. Then he said, "I can't promise ordinary. I can promise we'll tell you what we know instead of keeping you frightened in the dark." I didn't know whether he could keep that promise, but at least he understood what I was asking.
That afternoon I went through the copies of my father's old employment papers. His final pay stub listed Ashport Freight as the employer, yet the mailing address belonged to a company that no longer existed. I checked the address against the service order Dante had shown me. The street was different, but the suite number was the same: 604. It could have been coincidence. Chicago had thousands of offices. Still, the repetition unsettled me enough that I wrote it in my notebook beneath the inventory number.
I also remembered the last conversation I had with my mother about Samuel. She was washing dishes when I asked whether he had ever worked for bad people. She had stopped scrubbing a plate and stared at the window. "Sometimes," she said, "good people don't realize who they're working for until it's too late." I had wanted names. She had given me none. Now, surrounded by evidence that someone had interfered with Dante's wine, I wondered whether she had been trying to protect me from a truth she barely understood herself.
I wasn't falling in love with Dante Moretti. I repeated that to myself whenever I noticed the quiet way he listened or the care he took not to command me. Gratitude was not trust. Trust was not love. A man could do the right thing in one moment and the wrong thing in the next. I needed to remember that, particularly because the questions I carried might lead directly to his father's name.
Before leaving, I wandered past a display of old shipping photographs in the library. One showed Vittorio Moretti standing beside a line of warehouse workers. The caption read: ASHPORT EXPANSION, 2011. My father had disappeared that same year.
I leaned closer. At the edge of the photograph, half hidden behind a forklift, stood a young man in a navy work jacket. His face was turned away, but I knew the slope of his shoulders and the way he held his left hand. My father had broken two fingers as a teenager. They never straightened properly.
I touched the glass. “Dad?”
Dante came to stand beside me. “What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
He followed my gaze. “That photograph was taken at one of my father’s warehouses.”
“Do you have the original?”
“Probably. Why?”
I pulled my hand back. “I think I recognize someone.”
Before he could ask more, Marco entered with his phone pressed to his ear. His face was grim.
“The laboratory called,” he said. “They confirmed deliberate contamination. And the police found a second punctured bottle in the private rack.”
Dante turned toward him. “A second bottle?”
“Yes. Different label. Same kind of damage. Whoever did this planned for a backup.”
May you like
I stared at the photograph of my father, suddenly aware that the danger had not ended when I broke the Bordeaux. The person who wanted Dante dead had prepared for failure.
And someone in that mansion had been helping them.
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