Chapter 2 - THE THIRD NAME
“She told Mr. Hale, ‘Luca can never find out Daniel exists until after the wedding.’”
The words hung in the quiet of the study.
Luca Moretti didn’t blink. He didn’t shout. He didn’t throw the crystal glass sitting on the edge of his mahogany desk.
He just stared at the business card in his hand.
I stood frozen near the door, my apron suddenly feeling like a lead weight around my neck. The silence in the room was so heavy it made my ears ring.
“My former wife,” Luca said. His voice was lower now, stripped of the polite warmth he had used at the dinner table. “Elena.”
“Yes, sir,” I whispered.
“She died nine years ago.”
My breath hitched.
I stared at him, trying to process what he had just said. Nine years ago. But the boy on the card—Daniel Rossi—was listed as eleven years old.
If the boy was eleven, and Elena died nine years ago…
Luca slowly looked up from the card. His dark eyes locked onto mine, and for the first time since I’d started working at the estate, I saw the man the rest of Chicago whispered about. The businessman. The boss. The man who destroyed empires before breakfast.
“Who wrote this on the back of the card, Emily?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Moretti. It was sitting on the edge of the dresser in the guest room. I thought Mr. Hale left it behind.”
Luca walked around the desk. He stopped inches from me. He smelled of expensive cologne and cold anger.
“You understand what this implies.” It wasn’t a question.
“I—I think so.”
“An eleven-year-old boy. Born two years before my wife supposedly died in a car accident in Italy.” Luca’s jaw tightened. “A boy Vanessa knows about. A boy she is paying a crisis manager to hide from me until I put a ring on her finger.”
He picked up a heavy silver pocket watch from his desk—a family heirloom he always kept nearby. He traced the engraving with his thumb, his knuckles turning white.
“Sir, I should go—”
“You’re not going anywhere.”
Panic spiked in my chest. “Mr. Moretti, I just serve the food. I have a father to take care of. I can’t get involved in—”
“You are already involved, Emily.” His tone wasn’t a threat. It was a cold, hard fact. “Vanessa knows you heard them. If she is willing to hide a child from me, what do you think she will do to a server who knows her secret?”
The blood drained from my face.
My sixty-one dollars in the bank suddenly felt like a death sentence.
Luca reached for his phone. He didn’t dial. He just held it, staring at the screen.
“I cannot use my own men for this,” Luca said quietly, almost to himself. “Vanessa’s father helped me build this syndicate. Half my security team reports to her brother. If I start asking questions about Elena, Vanessa will know before midnight.”
He looked at me.
“Where do you live, Emily?”
“South Side,” I stammered. “Near the old railyard.”
He looked down at the business card again. Then, he turned the screen of his phone toward me.
He had typed a name into a private database. Daniel Rossi.
An address had popped up.
It wasn’t in Italy. It wasn’t in New York with Mr. Hale.
It was an apartment building on 42nd Street.
Four blocks from my apartment.
“I need you to go there,” Luca said.
I backed up a step. “No. Please. I’m just a maid.”
“You are a ghost,” Luca corrected softly. “You blend in. No one in my world knows who you are. If my men go to that neighborhood, alarms will sound. If you go, you’re just a woman walking home from work.”
He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a stack of hundred-dollar bills. He pressed them into my trembling hand. It was more money than I had made in a year.
“Find the boy. See if he is real. Do not engage. Just look.”
I stared at the money. My father’s rent. The medical bills. It was all right here.
But my gut told me this was a trap.
“Mr. Moretti,” I said, my voice shaking. “If your wife died nine years ago… who has been raising him?”
Luca’s eyes darkened. “That is exactly what I intend to find out.”
Before I could say another word, the heavy oak door of the study swung open.
My heart stopped.
Vanessa stood in the doorway.
May you like
She had taken off her diamonds. She wore a silk robe, her arms crossed, her eyes darting from the money in my hand to Luca’s face.
“Well,” Vanessa said, a slow, toxic smile spreading across her lips. “Isn’t this an interesting late-night meeting.”
