Chapter 6 - THE TRUTH IN THE SAFE DEPOSIT KEY
The luxury of the Presidential Suite suddenly felt like a cage.
I stared at Rosa Moretti, the elegant matriarch sipping whiskey by the window. My mind violently rejected what Vanessa had just said. My husband, David, was a high school math teacher. He drove a used sedan and spent his weekends coaching little league. He had no connection to the mob.
“You’re lying,” I spat at Vanessa, pulling Leo tighter against my legs. “David died in a car accident.”
“Did you see his body, Emma?” Vanessa asked, her dark eyes gleaming with sadistic pleasure. “Or did the hospital tell you it was a closed casket? A terrible, tragic fire that left nothing behind?”
My stomach plummeted. She was right. The police had told me the car burst into flames. I had never seen David’s face again.
“Why?” Luca demanded, stepping between me and the guns pointed at him. His voice was a lethal, vibrating hum. He looked at his mother. “Mom. Tell me she’s lying.”
Rosa set her whiskey glass down on the mahogany desk. She looked older in that moment, the weight of decades of violence pressing down on her shoulders.
“David Carter wasn't just a math teacher, Luca,” Rosa said quietly, refusing to look at me. “He was Thomas Carter’s son. When Vincenzo died, we realized Thomas had stolen the ledger. We spent years looking for him. Five years ago, my men found David.”
I couldn't breathe. The room was spinning.
“You tortured my husband to find my father?” I gasped, tears finally spilling hot and fast down my cheeks.
“He wouldn't talk,” Rosa said, her voice entirely devoid of emotion. “He was a brave man, Emma. He died protecting his father. And he died protecting you.”
A ragged sob tore from my throat. I covered Leo’s ears, burying his face in my hip so he couldn't hear the horrific truth about the father he barely remembered.
Vanessa laughed, clapping her hands together slowly. “Bravo, Rosa. What a beautiful confession. But you failed. David didn't talk, and Thomas hid so well you couldn't find him. So, I took over.”
Vanessa walked over to the desk, running her perfectly manicured hand over the leather cover of the ledger.
“I figured it out,” Vanessa smiled, looking at Luca. “I realized that if I married you, Rosa would eventually drop her guard. And when she did, I could hire Emma as a maid, keep her close, and wait for her senile old father to slip up.”
Vanessa picked up the heavy book. “And now, the Chicago syndicate belongs to the Bellini family.”
She turned to her men. “Kill Luca. Kill Rosa. Leave the maid and the brat.”
The enforcers raised their guns.
“Wait!” I screamed.
The desperate sound of my voice made everyone freeze.
I stepped out from behind Luca. I didn't care about the guns. I didn't care about the syndicate. I only cared that Vanessa was holding the wrong book.
“That’s not the ledger,” I said, my voice shaking but loud enough to command the room.
Vanessa stopped. She looked down at the leather book in her hands. “Excuse me?”
“My father had dementia,” I said, wiping the tears fiercely from my eyes. “But he wasn't stupid. He told me he checked the ledger into the cloakroom twenty years ago. But he didn't tell me what it looked like.”
Rosa frowned. “It’s the Moretti ledger, Emma. I recognize the leather binding. It’s my husband’s book.”
“No, it’s not,” I said, taking a step toward the desk.
I looked at a reversal that had been staring us in the face the entire time.
“My father was a bookkeeper,” I explained, my voice gaining strength. “He dealt with numbers. He dealt with weight. When Luca brought the box up from the cloakroom, it was carved mahogany. It weighed at least ten pounds empty.”
I pointed at the book in Vanessa’s hands.
“That book is thin. It’s a decoy. If my father checked a box into the Drake Hotel twenty years ago to protect his life, he wouldn't just leave a book sitting inside it for anyone with a claim ticket to find.”
Vanessa’s face twisted in fury. She ripped open the leather cover of the book.
It was entirely blank.
Pages and pages of empty, yellowed paper.
“Where is it?!” Vanessa shrieked, throwing the blank book across the room. It slammed into a crystal vase, shattering it into a hundred pieces.
“It’s right here,” a weak, raspy voice said from the doorway.
Everyone spun around.
Standing in the open doorway of the Presidential Suite, leaning heavily on the arm of a terrified hotel bellhop, was my father.
Thomas Carter was bleeding from the bandage on his head, wearing a hospital gown over his slacks. He looked frail, confused, and utterly exhausted.
But in his trembling hand, he held an old, tarnished safe deposit key.
“Dad!” I cried, rushing toward him, pulling Leo with me.
“I remembered, Emma,” my father smiled weakly, patting my cheek. “When the paramedics put me in the ambulance, I remembered where I really put it.”
He held up the key.
“I didn't put the ledger in the cloakroom box,” my father wheezed, looking directly at Rosa Moretti. “I put this key in the lining of my old coat. The coat I gave to the priest at St. Jude’s twenty years ago.”
Luca stepped forward, shielding us with his body. “Thomas, what does that key open?”
My father smiled, a brilliant, lucid spark in his cloudy eyes.
“It opens the safety deposit box at First National Bank,” my father said. “But it doesn't hold the ledger, Luca.”
Rosa’s face went pale. “What is in the box, Thomas?”
My father looked at the woman who had murdered his son.
“The blood samples from the night your husband was poisoned, Rosa,” my father revealed, dropping a bombshell that sucked the oxygen from the room. “Vincenzo Moretti wasn't killed by a rival family. He was poisoned by his own wife.”
The silence in the room was absolute.
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Rosa staggered backward, clutching the back of the sofa.
“And I gave the key to the priest,” my father finished, his voice trembling. “The same priest who is officiating your wedding tomorrow morning, Luca.”
