Chapter 3 - THE BLACK TOWN CAR ON ROUTE 9
Luca didn’t waste a second barking orders to the dining room.
“Daniel, take the keys to the Range Rover,” Luca commanded, already stripping off his formal tuxedo jacket and tossing it onto the leather sofa to reveal the shoulder holster strapped over his crisp white shirt. “Bring Cole with us. Tell the gatehouse to lock down the perimeter and keep the twenty-six guests in the dining room until I get back. Tell them Vanessa had a migraine and went upstairs.”
“Mr. Moretti, wait!” I stood up so fast my chair scraped backward against the hardwood floor. “I’m coming with you.”
Luca paused at the study door, his hand on the brass knob, and looked back at me. His dark eyes dropped to my white housekeeping apron and the bandage wrapped around my right wrist.
“You’re going home in a secure car with a guard, Hannah,” he said firmly. “You’ve already been put in danger once tonight because of my family’s business. Your shift is over.”
“It isn’t just your family’s business!” I said, my voice trembling as I stepped up to the desk and pointed at the four words engraved inside the back of his father’s gold pocket watch: BELLINI PAID THE GUARD.
Luca frowned. “What does that have to do with you?”
“My last name is Parker,” I said, holding his gaze without blinking even as my heart hammered against my ribs. “My father is Arthur Parker. He was the night-shift security supervisor at Pier 14 on November 14, 2015.”
Luca went completely still. Behind him, even Daniel stopped in the doorway.
“Arthur Parker?” Luca repeated quietly, a shadow crossing his sharp features. “The police report said Arthur Parker took fifty thousand dollars in cash to leave the East River gate unlocked for the arson crew.”
“My father never took a dime from anyone in his life!” I said fiercely, hot tears stinging the backs of my eyes. “We lived in a two-room apartment in Queens after that fire! I worked two diner jobs at sixteen to help pay for his inhalers because his lungs were burned from trying to drag Marco Santoro out of the billing office before the roof collapsed! When my dad woke up in Bellevue Hospital three days later, a detective told him Marco was dead and that if my dad didn’t sign a statement admitting to criminal negligence, they would charge him as an accomplice to murder!”
I stepped closer to Luca, my hands clenched at my sides.
“When I saw your estate ad for a housekeeper eleven months ago, I applied because I knew my father was innocent, and I hoped one day I’d hear someone mention what really happened at Pier 14,” I said, my voice breaking slightly. “If Marco Santoro is alive in Millbrook, he’s the only man on earth who saw my father try to save him that night. And if I can show you the shortcut through the old quarry road in Millbrook—where my dad and I used to fish before he got sick—we can beat Vanessa’s car to Sycamore Creek Road by ten minutes.”
Luca stared at me for three long beats. I saw the exact moment his view of me shifted—from a quiet, frightened maid he felt obligated to protect, to a daughter fighting for her father’s name just as fiercely as he was fighting for his.
“Get my cashmere trench coat off the rack by the door,” Luca told Daniel quietly. “Put it over her uniform. We leave in thirty seconds.”
Two minutes later, Daniel was pushing the heavy black Range Rover past eighty miles an hour up the rain-slicked asphalt of the Taconic State Parkway.
I sat in the backseat beside Luca, wrapped in his warm, cedar-scented black trench coat while Victor Cole sat up front in the passenger seat, tracking a glowing blue dot on his tablet screen.
“You put a GPS tracker on Vanessa’s town car?” Luca asked, leaning forward between the front seats.
“I didn’t put it on her car—I slipped an Apple AirTag into the lining of the decoy camera bag her brother’s driver took from me at four o’clock,” Cole said grimly, tapping the map. “They’re six miles ahead of us on Route 9, doing seventy. Wait—that’s not just her town car. Look at the intersection at Mile Marker 18. A second vehicle just pulled out of the rest stop to follow them.”
“Enzo Bellini,” Daniel muttered from behind the wheel. “Vanessa’s brother drives a silver Escalade. If he’s meeting her on the road, they aren’t going there to negotiate with Santoro.”
“Take Exit 14 right here, Daniel!” I said, leaning forward and pointing through the rain-streaked windshield at an unlit country turnoff bordered by thick pine trees. “That’s the old limestone quarry road. It’s gravel for two miles, then it drops straight down behind the creek bridge on Sycamore Creek Road. Route 9 wraps all the way around the reservoir—we’ll cut off four miles!”
Daniel didn’t hesitate; he looked in the rearview mirror for Luca’s nod, then cut the wheel hard to the right.
The heavy SUV roared off the highway ramp and onto the narrow, winding quarry road, gravel spraying against the undercarriage as the headlights carved through the pouring October rain.
As the car jolted over a washed-out rut in the road, I braced my left hand against the center console—and my bandaged right hand brushed against the heavy antique pocket watch resting in Luca’s palm.
“Hold this for me,” Luca said quietly, placing his father’s gold watch into my uninjured left hand while he checked the magazine of his nine-millimeter Beretta. “Your hands are steadier than you think, Hannah.”
I looked down at the open gold casing in my palm.
Under the dim blue map-light of the SUV’s ceiling, the watch tilted slightly—and the tiny brass safe-deposit key (714) shifted against the inner gears, catching on a hairline seam in the engraved rim.
Wait. The gold rim where BELLINI PAID THE GUARD was engraved wasn’t solid cast metal. It was a thin, removable bezel ring fitted inside the back lip of the case.
Carefully, using my thumbnail, I pried up the edge of the narrow gold ring.
It lifted right out of the watch casing—revealing a second line of microscopic engraving hidden underneath the ring, etched directly into the solid gold baseplate where no one would ever see it unless they removed the outer band.
My breath caught in my throat.
“Luca,” I whispered, holding the watch toward him under the map light. “Look under the bezel ring. The first line was a decoy in case the watch was ever stolen.”
Luca took the watch and held it close to the light.
The hidden engraving underneath didn’t say Bellini paid the guard.
Together, the top ring and the hidden bottom plate formed a single complete sentence:
BELLINI PAID THE GUARD CAPTAIN — DANTE MORETTI.
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Inside the speeding SUV, the silence was absolute.
Dante Moretti wasn’t a security guard. Dante Moretti was Luca’s uncle—his late father’s younger brother, who was currently sitting at the head of the dining table back at the mansion, hosting the twenty-six engagement guests we had just left behind.
