Chapter 4 - THE ENFORCER'S DAUGHTER
The cold air of the cellar seemed to crush the breath out of my lungs.
“No,” I stammered, backing away from the wool coat. “No, you’re wrong. My dad is a gentle man. He smells like sawdust and lemon oil. He fixes broken things. He doesn’t… he doesn’t kill people.”
Luca stepped out of the locker, holding the child’s drawing and the wooden rosary. His expression wasn’t angry; it was terribly, devastatingly calm. The look of a man who had spent his life untangling lies, only to find a new knot at the center of his own house.
“Sarah,” Luca said gently, stepping toward me. “The men who survive in my world don’t look like monsters. They look like quiet men who know how to work with their hands. If your father built these lockers, he knew my father’s secrets. He was trusted.”
“If he was so trusted,” I shot back, tears blurring my vision, “why didn’t he ever tell me? We were poor, Luca. We struggled to pay for heat every winter. If he was working for a mafia boss, where was the money?”
Luca looked down at the bloodstained wool coat hanging in the dark.
“Maybe he walked away,” Luca murmured. “Or maybe he took something the night my father died, and he’s been hiding ever since.”
He turned the wooden rosary over in his hand. It was beautiful, hand-carved olive wood, completely out of place in a locker meant for blood money and secrets.
Luca’s thumb brushed over the silver crucifix attached to the beads. He frowned, holding it closer to the flashlight.
“This isn’t my father’s rosary,” Luca said.
I wiped my eyes with the back of my sleeve. “How do you know?”
“Because my father wasn’t a religious man. And he definitely didn’t wear jewelry that belonged to the Moretti family.”
I stared at him. The Morettis were the rival family in the city. Even a waitress knew that. They had been in a quiet, bloodless cold war with the DeMarcos for a decade.
Luca pressed a tiny, hidden latch on the back of the silver crucifix. The cross popped open, revealing a tiny hollow compartment inside.
He tipped the cross over his palm.
A small, delicate silver necklace fell out. It was a thin chain, ending in a beautiful teardrop diamond.
Luca stared at the diamond, his jaw tightening so hard a muscle feathered in his cheek.
“I know this necklace,” he whispered.
“Whose is it?” I asked.
“It belongs to Camille,” Luca said, his voice dropping to a dangerous, icy register. “I bought it for her two years ago in Paris. It’s custom. One of a kind.”
My mind raced, trying to piece the impossible puzzle together. “If you bought it for her two years ago… how did it end up inside a locker that has been sealed for eleven years?”
Luca looked at me, the terrifying intellect behind his dark eyes clicking the pieces into place.
“It didn’t,” Luca said. “My father didn’t put this coat in here. The blood is old, but the coat was moved. Someone broke into this locker recently, planted Camille’s necklace inside the rosary, and left the door open for us to find.”
“But why?” I asked, a shiver running down my spine that had nothing to do with the cold.
“To frame her,” a voice echoed from the darkness of the cellar stairs.
Luca spun around, raising his pistol in one fluid motion, pushing me behind his broad shoulders.
Footsteps echoed on the stone.
It was Ethan.
The twelve-year-old boy was standing at the bottom of the steps, shivering in his dress clothes. But he wasn’t looking at his father’s gun. He was looking at the bloodstained coat in the locker.
“Ethan,” Luca commanded, his voice sharp. “I told you to lock yourself in your room with Vance.”
“Vance is gone,” Ethan said, his voice trembling but remarkably clear. “He locked me in, but he left. I climbed out the window and came down the servant’s stairs.”
“Why?” Luca asked, lowering the gun slightly but not holstering it.
Ethan reached into his pocket. His small, shaking hand pulled out a small, rectangular piece of stiff paper.
He held it out.
“Because Camille told me to run,” Ethan whispered.
Luca stepped forward and took the paper from his son. I peered over his arm to look at it.
It was a train ticket. A one-way sleeper cabin on the midnight express to Montreal. It was dated for tonight.
“Camille gave this to you?” Luca asked, his voice barely a whisper.
Ethan nodded, tears finally spilling over his pale cheeks. “She came to my room right before dinner. She was crying. She gave me a backpack with cash and this ticket. She told me that if anything happened tonight at dinner, I had to run to the station and never come back.”
“Why would she say that, Ethan?” Luca asked, dropping to one knee to be at eye level with his son.
Ethan sniffled, looking terrified. “She said Aunt Elena was going to kill us. All of us.”
The name echoed off the brick walls of the cellar. Elena. Luca’s older sister. The woman who had thrown a fit at dinner and stormed out.
May you like
“Elena is my sister,” Luca said firmly. “She would never hurt you.”
“She isn’t your sister, Dad,” Ethan cried, his voice breaking. “Camille heard her talking to Vance in the library yesterday. Aunt Elena isn’t a DeMarco. She’s a Moretti. And she’s the one who killed Grandpa.”
