Chapter 2 - THE NAME IN THE ROOM
Forty guests held their breath.
Luca Moretti stood perfectly still, his dark eyes locked on my face.
“Hannah,” he said, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. “What name?”
I looked at Vanessa.
Her face had drained of all color. The confident, cruel woman who had humiliated me minutes earlier was suddenly trembling.
“Don't say it,” Vanessa hissed, stepping toward me. “Hannah, I swear to God, if you say it, I will destroy you.”
Luca moved so fast I barely saw him step between us.
He didn't touch her. He didn't have to. The sheer, terrifying presence of the mafia boss forced Vanessa to freeze in her tracks.
“If you threaten her again,” Luca said softly, “you won't leave this room walking.”
He turned back to me.
“Tell me, Hannah.”
I swallowed hard, my hands shaking against my apron. I thought about the words I’d heard Vanessa whisper furiously into her phone yesterday while I was polishing the hallway mirrors.
“She said… Matteo,” I breathed.
The name echoed in the silent dining room.
A wine glass slipped from the hand of an older gentleman near the back, shattering against the marble floor.
Luca’s chest stopped moving.
“Matteo?” he whispered.
Matteo was Luca’s infant son. The baby boy who had supposedly died in the burning wreckage of Catherine’s car four years ago.
Teresa Moretti let out a broken sob, burying her face in her hands.
“She said he’s getting too old,” I continued, the truth spilling out of me. “I heard Mrs. Bellini on the phone. She said, ‘Matteo is five now. He remembers things. We have to move him before Luca finds the blue blanket.’”
Luca slowly turned toward his fiancée.
The man who controlled half of Chicago’s underworld looked completely, utterly broken.
“My son is alive?” Luca asked.
Vanessa’s lips trembled. She backed away, shaking her head. “Luca, please. It’s not what it sounds like. I was protecting you.”
“Protecting me?” Luca roared, the sound shaking the crystal chandeliers above us. “My son has been missing for four years! You watched me bury an empty casket because the police said the fire took everything! You watched me mourn him!”
“Catherine took him!” Vanessa screamed, tears ruining her perfect makeup. “She was running away from you, Luca! She faked his death so you would never find him!”
The guests began murmuring in shock.
Luca grabbed the edge of the dining table, his knuckles turning white. “And how did you know that? Unless you were there.”
Vanessa swallowed hard.
“I was there,” she confessed, her voice shaking. “I helped her.”
Silence fell over the room like a heavy blanket.
Vanessa looked around frantically. “She paid me to help her disappear! I was just a nanny back then! She said you were a monster, Luca. But then the car crashed. I couldn't save her. I only had time to pull Matteo from the backseat.”
“And you didn't bring him to me?” Luca stepped closer, his eyes burning with a lethal fire.
“I was terrified!” Vanessa cried. “You would have killed me for helping her! I put him in a private boarding school upstate. I paid for it out of my own pocket. I’ve been keeping him safe for you!”
It sounded like a desperate, almost believable lie.
But I knew she was lying.
Because Teresa had just squeezed my hand.
“Then why,” Teresa said, her voice cutting through the tension, “did Catherine stitch his name into a blanket that was hidden in this house?”
Vanessa froze.
“Go upstairs, Hannah,” Luca commanded, never taking his eyes off Vanessa. “Go to my mother’s room. Bring me the blanket.”
“I can't,” I whispered.
Luca frowned. “Why?”
I reached into my apron pocket.
My fingers brushed against the fabric I had found in the laundry chute an hour before the dinner started.
“Because Vanessa already threw it away,” I said, pulling the torn, burned edge of the blue fabric into the light.
But as I unfolded the charred remains of the baby blanket, something heavy fell from the center of it and clattered onto the dining table.
It wasn't a toy.
It was a heavy, silver pocket watch.
And its glass face was shattered.
Teresa gasped, clutching her chest.
Luca stared at the watch. His face went completely pale.
Because we all recognized it.
“That belongs to my brother,” Luca whispered.
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