Chapter 8 - ASHES AND LEMON CAKE
I pulled Lily behind my back on the narrow wooden steps, shielding her small body with mine as I stared up into the barrel of Vanessa’s silver revolver.
From the main kitchen just beyond her shoulder, the sharp fumes of gasoline drifted down into the cold pantry air.
“You won’t shoot me, Vanessa,” I said, keeping my voice steady even though my knees were trembling against the wooden risers. “If that gun goes off in a room full of gas fumes, you’ll blow yourself up before you ever reach the driveway.”
Vanessa’s eyes darted nervously toward the kitchen floor behind her, where the wet sheen of gasoline reached within four feet of the pantry threshold.
She lowered the silver lighter into her coat pocket, but the revolver didn't waver a single inch.
“Then walk up the stairs slowly and hand me the burgundy book,” she whispered fiercely. “Matteo said the vault manager told him a woman in a black sweater pulled something from beneath the tray liner. Give it to me right now, Claire!”
“Why?” I asked, taking one slow step up the stairs while keeping Lily pressed safely behind my skirt. “So you can cover up my sister’s murder the same way you covered up Sarah’s crash?”
Vanessa’s lip curled.
“Your sister was a nobody clerk who stuck her nose into a fifty-million-dollar family merger for five hundred dollars in hush money from Sarah!” Vanessa hissed. “Do you have any idea what my father did to build the Bellini name in this city? Do you know what he did to me when I got pregnant at nineteen by my own cousin because Matteo was too broke to marry me?”
Her voice cracked, a flash of raw, ugly desperation breaking through her polished society veneer.
“My father took my baby away the day she was born and told me the only way I’d ever have a dime of the family trust—the only way I’d ever stop being an embarrassment to him—was if I married Luca Moretti and merged the harbors! Sarah had everything! She had the mansion, the husband who worshipped the ground she walked on, the perfect little daughter! All she had to do was get out of the way!”
She didn't hear the silent shadow moving through the dark butler’s pantry behind her.
Because four feet behind Vanessa, standing just inside the unlit doorway where the kitchen met the dining hall, Luca had stepped over the unconscious body of his guard, Marco.
And standing beside Luca, with Luca’s black nine-millimeter pressed firmly against the jagged burn scar on his neck, was Matteo Bellini—his hands bound behind his back with a strip of wire from the wine cellar.
Luca hadn't fired a shot outside.
He had taken Matteo silently by the garage door when Matteo went back for a second gas can.
“She didn't get in your way, Vanessa,” Luca said quietly from the dark archway behind her. “You murdered my wife because you couldn't stand that I loved her.”
Vanessa spun around with a shriek, her silver revolver swinging wildly toward Luca’s chest.
That was the exact second I lunged up the final three steps and swung the heavy oak recipe box with both hands right into Vanessa’s wrist.
Crack!
The solid oak corner struck her radius bone.
The silver revolver flew out of her hand before her finger could pull the trigger, skidding harmlessly across the wet marble counter and splashing into the stainless-steel sink.
Vanessa screamed, clutching her bruised wrist as she stumbled backward—and right into the waiting arms of Marco, who had just groggily pulled himself up from the pantry floor with blood matting his hairline.
In the center of the kitchen, right beside the pedestal stand where Lily’s crooked yellow lemon cake still sat untouched since dinner, Matteo Bellini dropped to his knees as Luca forced him down.
“You’re a dead man if you touch me, Luca!” Matteo spat, sweat pouring down his scarred neck as sirens finally began to wail in the distance down Astor Street. “Uncle Arthur has half the state appellate judges in his pocket! That hospital paper from the bank was stolen without a warrant—it won’t hold up in court for ten minutes!”
Luca looked down at the man who had run Sarah’s sedan off Lake Shore Drive in the freezing rain five years ago.
For a terrifying second, as I held Lily’s face pressed against my shoulder so she wouldn't have to watch, I thought Luca was going to pull the trigger right there in the kitchen.
Every muscle in Luca’s tall frame vibrated with five years of grief, rage, and agony.
“Daddy?” Lily’s small, muffled voice came from against my sweater. “Is the bad man gone?”
The sound of his ten-year-old daughter’s voice broke the dark spell in Luca’s eyes.
He looked at Lily, and the cold mafia boss vanished, leaving only the father who called home at 8:30 every night so his little girl could fall asleep.
“I don’t need a warrant from the bank, Matteo,” Luca said calmly, keeping the gun leveled at Matteo’s chest while blue and red police lights began flashing through the front windows of the mansion. “And Arthur’s appellate judges can’t help you.”
“Why the hell not?” Matteo sneered.
I reached up with my free hand and pointed toward the small, blinking green dot nestled inside the brass chandelier directly above the kitchen island.
“Because three weeks ago, after two catering servers were caught stealing silver spoons after a charity luncheon,” I said, looking down at Vanessa and Matteo, “Mr. Moretti had high-definition audio and video cameras installed in the kitchen and the basement pantry.”
Vanessa’s face went slack with horror.
She slowly lifted her eyes toward the chandelier above the lemon cake.
“Every single word you said in the pantry this afternoon when you tore up Sarah’s recipe card,” I told her quietly, “and every word you and Matteo just shouted about poisoning Lily’s tea, running Sarah off Lake Shore Drive, and murdering Hannah Miller—was just recorded and uploaded directly to the cloud server downtown.”
Ten seconds later, the front doors of the mansion burst open as twelve tactical officers from the Chicago Police Department’s Internal Affairs and Homicide task force—led by a federal prosecutor Luca had called on the drive back from the bank—flooded into the hallway.
As two officers dragged a sobbing, handcuffed Vanessa and a cursing Matteo out through the front doors into the flashing lights of the squad cars, the federal prosecutor paused beside Luca in the doorway.
“We picked up Judge Arthur Bellini at the precinct ten minutes ago when the kitchen audio feed came through to my phone, Mr. Moretti,” the prosecutor said grimly. “Between the digitalis lab sheet and their confession on your security cloud, none of the three of them will ever see the outside of a federal penitentiary again.”
When the last squad car pulled away from the curb and the smell of gasoline was being scrubbed from the hallway by Luca’s night crew, the grand dining room was finally quiet.
On the edge of the marble kitchen counter sat Lily’s crooked lemon sour cream cake.
One side had collapsed slightly in the heat of the evening, and the shaky yellow icing still read: FOR DADDY. LOVE, LILY.
Luca walked over to the counter, picked up a clean silver fork, and took another bite of the crooked cake.
May you like
Then he turned to me and his daughter, his dark eyes shining with unshed tears.
“Best cake I’ve ever tasted in my life,” he said softly.
