Chapter 3 - THE BOY IN THE NAVY COAT
Luca moved faster than I had ever seen a man move in dress shoes.
Before I had made it halfway past the second wooden bench, he had crossed the marble floor and grabbed the back of the driver’s leather collar.
There was no shouting.
No dramatic scene for the station police to notice.
Just the sharp crack of leather against a brass bench armrest as Luca spun the man around and pinned him by the throat with one forearm.
“Touch them again,” Luca whispered, “and your boss won’t find enough of you to bury.”
The driver’s face went gray.
He held both hands up, palms out, his eyes darting wildly to Marco, who had appeared at Luca’s left shoulder like a shadow.
“Mr. Moretti—Mr. Bellini only told me to make sure they got on the eight-fifteen south—”
“Get out of my sight.”
Marco yanked the man backward by his jacket and shoved him toward the street exit.
Immediately, the tension in Luca’s shoulders changed.
He turned around slowly.
Clara Moretti was still on her knees beside the bench, one wrinkled hand pressed defensively against the little boy’s chest.
When she looked up and saw her son standing there in his tuxedo, her chin trembled.
“Luca,” she breathed.
Luca dropped to one knee on the dirty station floor—right in his five-thousand-dollar tailored suit—and wrapped both arms around his mother.
“Ma,” he said, his voice rough against her white hair. “I didn’t know. I swear to God I didn’t know you were downstairs.”
Mrs. Moretti patted his back with a shaky hand, her eyes finding mine over his shoulder.
She gave me a small, tearful nod.
“I know now, sweetheart,” she whispered. “This kind girl tried to tell me you hadn’t forgotten.”
Then the little boy between them shifted.
He didn’t cry.
He didn’t hide behind Mrs. Moretti’s skirt the way most five-year-olds would when two huge men in dark suits towered over him.
Instead, he frowned up at Luca with dark brown eyes that were an exact, terrifying mirror of Luca’s own.
Same thick lashes.
Same stubborn crease right between the eyebrows.
“Are you the man with the big stairs?” the boy asked.
His voice was small, clear, and slightly hoarse from the cold air.
Luca froze.
Slowly, he eased back from his mother and looked down at the child.
“Yeah,” Luca said quietly. “I have big stairs. Who are you, pal?”
“Leo.” The boy held up his wooden train by one wheel. “My wheel broke in the dark room.”
My heart squeezed.
The dark room.
I looked down at the navy wool coat Leo was wearing.
The sleeves were rolled up three times to fit his small arms, and pinned inside the lapel was a frayed cloth label with faded black ink.
I recognized that handwriting.
During my third month working at the mansion, I had cleaned out the cedar closets on the third floor—the wing nobody used.
I had found a box of boy’s winter clothes with the exact same name sewn into the collars: Luca Moretti.
“Ma,” Luca said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Where did he get my old coat?”
Clara Moretti slowly stood up, leaning on my arm as I stepped forward to help her.
Her arthritis made her fingers stiff against my wrist.
“Not here,” she said, glancing anxiously toward the glass doors where a black sedan had just idled past the curb. “Luca, please. Take us somewhere with locked doors.”
Wait.
I looked down at Leo’s small hand as he reached for mine.
Why was he reaching for me?
His little fingers curled naturally around two of mine, warm and sticky from a peppermint, and he looked up at my face as if he already knew me.
“You’re the soup lady,” Leo said matter-of-factly. “From the cupboard window.”
A cold shiver went down my spine.
The cupboard window.
In the basement kitchen of Luca’s mansion, beside the service elevator, there was an old frosted-glass pantry door that led into the boiler room hallway.
Half an hour ago, when I had gone down for fresh linens, I had thought I heard a latch click behind that frosted glass.
I had assumed it was the house cat.
Mrs. Moretti hadn’t left Leo at Union Station while she came to the house.
She had brought him into the house.
And while she sat eating soup by the elevator to keep the kitchen staff’s attention on her, someone else had been hiding this little boy behind the pantry door.
Ten minutes later, we were back inside the armored SUV.
Marco didn’t head back toward the Gold Coast mansion.
At a quiet two-word order from Luca, he drove west toward an old brownstone in Little Italy that belonged to the Moretti family long before the lakefront estate existed.
In the backseat, Leo fell asleep within three blocks, his head resting heavily against my thigh while his fingers stayed tangled in my apron strings.
Luca sat opposite us on the jump seat, his elbows on his knees, staring at the sleeping child.
Then he looked at his mother.
“Tell me,” Luca said.
Clara reached into her battered handbag and pulled out a folded piece of yellow lined paper—the kind torn from a grade-school notebook.
On one side, drawn in blue and red crayon, was a picture of a small yellow house with a crooked chimney and three stick figures: a tall woman, a little boy, and a man wearing a silver watch.
She turned it over.
Written across the back in shaky adult cursive was a single sentence:
Clara, if I am not on the four o’clock bus by Friday, take Leo to Luca and tell him Arthur Bellini paid for the brakes.
Luca stared at the paper.
The silence inside the car felt heavy enough to crack the windows.
“Whose handwriting is that?” Luca asked.
“Elena’s,” his mother whispered. “The nurse who took care of your brother Dante after the crash.”
My breath caught in my throat.
“After the crash?” I repeated before I could stop myself. “Sir… everyone at the house says your brother died in that car six years ago.”
Luca didn’t look at me.
His eyes were fixed on the crayon drawing in his hand.
“He did die,” Luca said, his voice hollow. “I identified the body at the county morgue myself. At least… I identified the man wearing his wedding ring and his watch.”
Clara shook her head slowly, tears finally spilling over her pale eyelashes.
“Dante died that night, Luca,” she whispered. “Because the brakes on his car were cut before he left Arthur Bellini’s warehouse. You were twenty-four. If you had known it wasn’t an accident, you would have started a war with the Bellinis that would have gotten you killed too.”
“You knew?” Luca’s voice cracked with a pain so raw I had to look away. “For six years, Ma, you let me shake Arthur Bellini’s hand? You let me get engaged to his daughter?”
“I didn’t know until Tuesday!” Clara cried softly, pressing a hand over her mouth so she wouldn’t wake Leo. “Elena hid for five years in Joliet because she was three months pregnant with Dante’s son when his car went off the bridge. Vanessa has been paying her rent every month to stay quiet and stay away from Chicago.”
I felt the blood drain from my face.
Wait a second.
If Vanessa was paying Elena to stay away so the engagement would go through… why would Vanessa be terrified that Mrs. Moretti was at the house tonight?
Unless the rent payments had stopped.
“Where is Elena now?” Luca asked darkly.
May you like
Clara reached into her cardigan pocket and pulled out a small brass key stamped with a three-digit number: 412.
“She missed the bus on Friday,” Clara whispered. “And when I went to her house in Joliet this morning, the front door was wide open… and your fiancée’s gold bracelet was lying on the kitchen floor.”
