Chapter 2 - THE MAN WITH THE SILVER SCAR
Luca didn’t raise his voice.
He didn’t have to.
When a man like Luca Moretti stops moving, the air in the room suddenly feels too thin to breathe.
He stood in the center of the half-dismantled workshop, holding the new black leather glove.
“Recognized who?” Luca repeated.
Vanessa’s back hit the edge of the staircase.
Her red engagement gown looked entirely out of place in the dusty, scarred basement.
“Frank is confused,” she said quickly. Her voice was too high. Too thin. “He’s sixty-four years old, Luca. It’s dark down here. He saw a contractor and his mind played a trick on him.”
Frank didn’t blink.
He stood beside the wooden workbench he and Antonio had built in 1988, holding his green lunchbox like a shield.
“His name is Marco Rossi,” Frank said quietly.
Luca’s head snapped toward Frank.
“Marco Rossi?”
“Yes.”
“My father’s old bookkeeper?”
“Yes.”
Vanessa’s hands tightened on the banister. “This is ridiculous. Marco Rossi hasn’t been seen in Chicago for a decade.”
“He has a silver scar shaped like a crescent moon under his left ear,” Frank said. He didn’t look at Vanessa; he only looked at Luca. “He got it when a glass bottle shattered at your parents’ anniversary party in 1999. I was the one who handed him the towel to stop the bleeding. I know his face, Luca.”
I stood near the doorway, watching the blood drain from Vanessa’s cheeks.
I was just the maid.
I wasn’t supposed to speak.
But I remembered something from earlier that afternoon.
“He was wearing a gray suit,” I said.
Everyone turned to me.
Luca’s dark eyes locked onto mine. “What did you say, Emma?”
My heart pounded, but I kept my voice steady.
“Around three o’clock today,” I said, “Mrs. Bellini asked me to fetch a bottle of sparkling water. When I brought it to the hallway upstairs, I saw her speaking with a man in a gray suit. He had a silver scar on his neck. I noticed it because he kept his collar turned up, but when he turned his head, the scar caught the light.”
Vanessa took a step toward me. “You lying little—”
“Enough,” Luca snapped.
He didn’t shout. The word just fell like a hammer.
He looked at his fiancée.
The woman he was supposed to marry in two months. The woman who had just tried to erase thirty-eight years of his family’s history by firing a man who helped raise him.
“Why is the man my father fired thirteen years ago walking through my house on the night of my engagement?” Luca asked.
Vanessa swallowed hard. “Luca, listen to me. I was trying to protect you.”
“From what?”
“From the past. From things you don’t need to know.”
“My father fired Marco Rossi a week before he was killed in a hit-and-run,” Luca said, his voice dropping an octave. “The police always suspected Rossi had something to do with the missing money from the family accounts, but they never proved it. And now you’re bringing him into my house?”
“He came to me!” Vanessa cried out, tears finally spilling over her eyelashes. “He contacted me last week. He said he had proof that your father wasn’t the man you thought he was. He said there were documents hidden in this house. In the study.”
Luca stared at her.
For a second, I thought he was going to break things.
Instead, he turned to Frank.
“Open the study.”
Frank didn’t hesitate. He walked past Vanessa, ignoring her completely, and led us down the narrow basement corridor to the heavy oak door of Antonio Moretti’s private study.
The door was slightly ajar.
The lock had been drilled out.
Luca pushed the door open.
The room smelled like stale tobacco, old leather, and time. Nothing had been touched since the day Antonio died. His favorite armchair. His mahogany desk. The framed photos of a young Luca playing baseball.
But the bookshelf behind the desk had been violently pulled away from the wall.
Behind it was a small, square steel safe.
The door of the safe was hanging open.
“They found it,” Frank whispered.
Luca crossed the room in three strides. He fell to one knee, looking inside the dark steel box.
“It’s empty,” Vanessa said from the doorway, her voice shaking. “Whatever Marco was looking for, he took it. See? I told you. I was trying to stop him.”
Luca didn’t answer.
He reached deep into the back of the empty safe.
His hand brushed against something the thieves had missed in the dark.
He pulled it out and stood up.
In the palm of the Mafia Boss’s hand rested a child’s object.
A small, faded, hand-drawn picture on cheap construction paper.
It was a drawing of a house. Two stick figures standing outside.
At the top, in clumsy crayon letters, were the words: To Papa.
But that wasn’t what made the air leave the room.
What made the air leave the room was the heavy silver chain wrapped tightly around the folded drawing.
A silver rosary.
Frank gasped. He dropped his lunchbox. It hit the floor with a loud metallic clatter.
Luca stared at the rosary, his face turning the color of ash.
“Vanessa,” Luca said softly. “You said Marco Rossi took everything.”
“He did! The safe was empty when I got here!”
Luca turned around.
“Then why are you wearing the clasp to this rosary on your wrist?”
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Vanessa froze.
We all looked. Dangling from Vanessa’s diamond tennis bracelet was a tiny, distinctive silver cross—the exact missing piece of the broken rosary Luca was holding.
