Chapter 4 - THE SCAR UNDER THE DIAMONDS
Vanessa backed away until the edge of the mahogany sideboard pressed into her spine. Her fingers remained clamped over the diamond bracelet on her right wrist as if she could push the scar back into her skin.
“It was a horse,” she whispered, her chest heaving. “In Connecticut. My father was there. Tell him, Dad!”
Richard stepped in front of his daughter, his broad shoulders blocking her from Luca’s view. Yet for the first time all night, Richard didn’t look angry. He looked calculating—and terrified of what his daughter might say next.
“She was nineteen years old, Luca,” Richard said, lowering his voice to a grim, fatherly rumble. “Not sixteen. She lied about how she got the scar because she was ashamed. The night your brother died, Vanessa was at a college frat party in Evanston. She drank too much, put her arm through a glass storm door, and called Arthur to pick her up so her mother wouldn’t find out. Arthur must have stopped in Cicero on the way back to the city while she was passed out in the backseat.”
It was a brilliant lie. It explained the car, the driver, the blood, and the date without putting either of them near the Moretti estate on the night of the fire.
Vanessa blinked rapidly, latching onto the lifeline her father had thrown her. “Yes! Yes, I was humiliated, Luca. You know how strict my mother was before she passed. I couldn’t tell you I used to drink like that when I was nineteen!”
Luca didn’t buy it. I could tell by the rigid line of his shoulders that a twelve-year-old wall inside him had just cracked clean down the middle.
“Stay in this house,” Luca told them both, his voice icy. “Dante and two men are in the foyer. If either of you touches a phone or steps past the front porch before I get back from Cicero, our engagement is the least of your worries.”
He turned to me. “Come on, Emily.”
Five minutes later, I was sitting in the heated leather passenger seat of Luca’s black SUV as he drove south through the snow-slicked streets of Chicago. I still wore his suit jacket over my uniform. In my lap, my hands were knotted together so tightly my knuckles ached.
For two miles, neither of us spoke. The rhythmic sweep of the windshield wipers was the only sound between us.
“Why did you do it, Emily?” Luca asked suddenly, glancing at me in the dim glow of the dashboard lights. “Your mother is sick. I sign the payroll checks—I know you send every dollar to Rush Hospital. Richard Bellini could have ruined your life tonight, and I might not have believed a word you said. Why risk everything for a maid you barely knew and a woman who died or vanished twelve years ago?”
I looked out at theamber streetlights reflecting off the wet pavement.
“Because when my dad walked out on us ten years ago, nobody believed my mom when she said he’d emptied her savings account,” I said quietly. “People with money always close ranks, Mr. Moretti. Tonight, when Vanessa poured that wine down my front and told me to get on my knees, I realized if I stayed quiet, I’d just be another girl your future wife erased.”
Luca’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “I’m sorry for what happened at my table tonight, Emily. Nobody in my house will ever speak to you like that again.”
We pulled onto Cermak Road in Cicero just before midnight. The neon sign of Goldstein & Sons Loan & Pawn was dark, heavy steel grates pulled down over the front glass. Luca parked at the curb.
“The owner lives in the apartment upstairs,” I said, pointing to a yellow square of light on the second floor. “Claire said his name is Abe. He’s seventy-eight, and he doesn’t sleep much.”
Ten minutes later, we were standing inside the cramped, dusty back office of the pawnshop, smelling of old coins, cigar smoke, and radiator heat. Abe, a stooped man in a flannel robe with thick glasses, looked from the faded receipt in his hand to Luca’s tailored shirt.
“I kept my word to Arthur,” Abe rasped, turning the dial on a heavy green floor safe in the corner. “He paid the storage fee five years in advance right before he died. Said if a man named Moretti ever came holding the blue ticket, I was to hand over the box.”
Abe pulled out a rusted metal cigar box and set it on the wooden counter.
Luca lifted the lid.
Inside lay the silver locket—Wait. No, the locket was already in Luca’s coat pocket. Inside the box was something else entirely.
A folded cream-colored silk scarf, stained dark brown at the edges with twelve-year-old dried blood. Wrapped inside the scarf was a brass Saint Christopher medal on a leather cord, and a water-damaged ledger page torn from an old accounting book.
Luca picked up the Saint Christopher medal. His breath hitched so sharply he had to brace a hand against the counter.
“Marco wore this around his neck every day of his life,” Luca whispered, his thumb tracing the worn brass saint. “The coroner told me the fire was so hot the chain must have melted into the ashes.”
“It didn’t melt,” Abe said quietly from behind the counter. “Because the girl who gave that box to Arthur outside my shop that morning took it off your brother’s neck herself before the roof caved in.”
Luca spun toward the old man. “Wait. You saw Sofia Rossi that morning?”
“I saw two girls that morning,” Abe corrected, adjusting his glasses. “The dark-haired one—Sofia—had soot all over her face and burns on her hands. She was begging the driver, Arthur, to take her to the hospital. And the other girl in the backseat of the town car—the pretty rich one in the torn velvet dress with the bleeding wrist—was holding a gun on her.”
My stomach dropped. Vanessa. Vanessa hadn’t just known Sofia. She had been at the mansion the night of the fire.
Luca unfolded the bloodstained ledger page with trembling fingers. It wasn’t a Moretti family ledger. At the top was the stamped letterhead of Bellini Construction & Municipal Supply.
Across the bottom, written in frantic, soot-smeared lipstick, were four words in Sofia Rossi’s handwriting:
Marco didn’t burn. Check the boat.
Before Luca could speak, Abe looked past us toward the shop’s front window.
May you like
“Mr. Moretti,” the old man said tensely. “Did you leave your headlights on?”
Luca turned. Outside the steel grates, the street was empty. His black SUV was gone—and sitting right on the snowy curb where the passenger door had been was my mother’s plastic Rush Hospital prescription bottle, which had been inside my coat pocket back at the mansion.
