Chapter 2 - THE TRAIN TICKET
The heavy oak doors of the dining room opened.
A man in a dark suit walked in, carrying a small black clutch.
Elena’s purse.
He handed it to Dominic.
The silence in the room was so deep I could hear the grandfather clock ticking in the hallway.
Elena stood frozen at the edge of the table.
Her hands were shaking.
She wasn’t the composed, untouchable woman she had been ten minutes ago.
“Dominic,” she said.
Her voice cracked.
“You’re humiliating me in front of our guests. Over a maid’s imagination.”
Dominic didn’t look at her.
He unclasped the purse.
He tipped it over the white linen tablecloth.
Lipstick.
A silver compact.
A ring of keys.
And a small, unlabeled orange prescription bottle.
Elena closed her eyes.
Dominic picked up the bottle.
He unscrewed the cap and poured the contents into his palm.
Three large, white capsules.
Identical to the one I had seen empty in her bathroom.
“My mother’s sleeping pills,” Dominic said softly.
The kind that didn’t just make you tired.
The kind that knocked you unconscious for eight hours.
He finally looked at Elena.
“You were going to drug me.”
“No!” she cried, stepping forward. “Dominic, please. I was just—”
“Why?”
His voice didn’t rise.
It didn’t have to.
The sheer, terrifying weight of it made two of the guests push their chairs back from the table.
“Because you’ve been working too much,” Elena lied. Her chest heaved. “You haven’t slept in days. I was worried about your heart. I just wanted you to rest.”
It was a good lie.
Almost believable.
Except for one thing.
Dominic sifted through the rest of the items on the table.
He picked up a small, stiff piece of paper.
A blue and white rectangle.
I recognized it immediately.
A train ticket.
“If you wanted me to rest, Elena,” Dominic asked quietly, “why do you have a one-way Amtrak ticket to New York in your purse?”
Elena’s face drained of all color.
“And why,” Dominic continued, looking closer at the ticket, “is it departing at 11:30 tonight?”
It was 9:00 PM.
If he had drunk the coffee, he would have been unconscious by 9:30.
She wasn’t trying to help him rest.
She was running away.
The Reversal hit the room like a physical shockwave.
Elena Marchello wasn’t a gold digger trying to secure her spot as a mafia boss’s wife.
She was a prisoner trying to escape.
But that didn’t make sense.
Dominic gave her everything. Wealth. Status. Protection.
“Who are you running from, Elena?” Dominic asked.
“Nobody,” she whispered.
Dominic stood up.
He towered over her, his broad shoulders blocking the candlelight.
“You were going to drug me, walk out the front door, and get on a train in two hours. Who is waiting for you in New York?”
“I can’t tell you.”
Tears spilled down her cheeks.
“If I tell you, they’ll kill him.”
Dominic’s eyes darkened.
He reached back into the pile of her belongings on the table.
He opened her silver compact mirror.
He pried the mirror back with his thumb.
A hidden compartment popped open.
Dominic pulled out a folded, worn photograph.
He stared at it for a long time.
Then, slowly, he turned his head and looked down the table.
He wasn’t looking at Elena.
He was looking at his eleven-year-old son, Matthew.
May you like
Dominic threw the photograph onto the table.
“Why,” Dominic whispered, his voice trembling with a lethal rage I had never heard before, “do you have a picture of my dead brother holding my son?”
