Chapter 2 - THE HOUSE ON WEST ADDISON
The dining room felt like a church where someone had just dropped a coffin.
Thirty of Chicago’s wealthiest, most dangerous people sat frozen over their untouched plates of veal. Nobody dared to look at the head of the table, where Luca Moretti stood with a child’s red wool mitten crushed in his fist.
Vanessa reached for his arm, the diamonds at her wrist flashing under the chandelier. “Luca, please. Sit down. Not in front of your guests.”
Luca didn’t shake her off. He didn’t have to. He just looked at her hand on his sleeve until she pulled it back as if the wool had burned her skin.
“Put your coat on, Sal,” Luca said.
Sal set his cardboard box down on an empty velvet chair, unfolded his heavy dark driving coat, and slid his arms into the sleeves. For seventy-one years old, his shoulders straightened like a soldier being called back to the front lines.
Luca looked at me next. “Emma. Take Sal’s box to the foyer. Then get in the car.”
“Me, sir?” My heart hammered against my ribs. I was just the housekeeper.
“Vanessa tried to use you to throw him out like trash,” Luca said, his voice dropping to a low, steady rumble that carried to the back corners of the room. “You had the spine to walk him through that door. Tonight, you’re the only person in my house besides Sal whose word I trust. Get your coat.”
“Luca, you’re being ridiculous!” Vanessa snapped, her composure cracking as whispers broke out near the bar. She gathered up the heavy silk skirt of her red gown and hurried after us as we crossed the marble foyer. “If you go to that house like this, you’re going to ruin everything my father and you have spent two years building!”
Luca didn’t answer. He held the heavy front door open for me, then for Sal.
Outside, the September wind off Lake Michigan carried the first sharp bite of autumn. Sal walked straight to the black sedan parked at the bottom of the stone steps—not the hired town car Vanessa had called to banish him, which was just pulling up to the gate, but Luca’s armored Mercedes.
Before Sal could open the driver’s door, Vanessa wedged herself between him and the fender. Her breathing was ragged, her carefully pinned dark hair coming loose in the wind.
“Don’t go inside that house, Luca,” she begged. The cold arrogance she had used on me in the garage was completely gone. In the amber glow of the porch lights, she didn’t look like a spoiled socialite anymore. She looked terrified. “I swear to you on my mother’s grave, the boy isn’t mine.”
Luca stopped at the rear passenger door. “Sal heard him call you Mom.”
“He’s four years old! He’s confused!” Vanessa’s hands trembled as she clutched her bare arms against the chill. “His mother was my younger sister, Clara.”
I stood by the passenger side, my coat pulled tight around my uniform, watching Luca’s face. A muscle ticked in his jaw.
“Clara lives in Milan,” Luca said. “Your father told me she’s studying art restoration in Italy.”
“My father tells people whatever keeps the Bellini name clean,” Vanessa whispered, her voice cracking. “Clara hasn’t been in Italy for five years. My father cut her off when she got pregnant. He made all of us swear we’d never speak her name again. And Clara… Clara died in a clinic in Evanston six months ago. Pneumonia. By the time I found out, she was already gone. The boy didn’t know who I was when I started visiting him. I look just like her, Luca. We have the same voice. The first time I walked onto that porch, he ran at my legs crying for his mama, and I couldn’t—I didn’t have the heart to tell a four-year-old boy that his mother was in the ground.”
A tear spilled over her lashes, cutting a dark track through her makeup.
For a long moment, the only sound was the rustle of dry oak leaves scraping across the driveway. It made sense. More than that, it sounded horribly, painfully human. Looking at Vanessa’s shivering shoulders, I felt a sudden wave of doubt. Had I just blown up a woman’s life because she was trying to protect an orphaned nephew from two ruthless mafia families?
Luca studied her in the dim light. “If you were helping your dead sister’s boy, why hide him from me? Why try to fire Sal to keep it quiet?”
“Because of who his father was!” Vanessa cried out. “If you or my father ever found out whose blood is in that little boy’s veins, neither of you would let him live under this roof. You know how these families work, Luca! Sins don’t die with the parents!”
Luca’s eyes hardened, though not at her. “I have never raised a hand to a child in my life, Vanessa. Get in the car.”
The drive to West Addison took twenty-two minutes. Nobody spoke. Up front, Sal drove with the smooth, practiced grace of a man who knew every pothole in Chicago. In the back, Vanessa stared out the tinted window, twisting her diamond engagement ring around and around her finger while I sat awkwardly in the front passenger seat, wishing I could disappear into the leather upholstery.
When Sal eased the sedan to the curb, we were in a quiet, working-class neighborhood of brick bungalows and narrow yards behind Wrigleyville.
The house at 4118 West Addison was small, with peeling white trim and a chain-link fence. A rusted red tricycle sat in the dead grass by the steps. Warm yellow light spilled through a patched screen door.
Luca got out first. Vanessa followed, practically running in her heels to reach the porch ahead of him. Sal and I trailed a few steps behind, stopping at the bottom of the wooden stairs.
Before Vanessa could knock, the inside door opened.
An older woman in her sixties stood behind the screen. She wore a faded floral cardigan over a wool skirt, her gray hair pulled back in a neat bun. When she saw Vanessa, she frowned, wiping her hands on a dish towel. When her eyes shifted past Vanessa and landed on Luca—and then down at the bottom of the steps, where Sal stood under the streetlight—the color drained completely from her face.
She didn’t look like a hired babysitter. She looked like a woman seeing ghosts.
“Mrs. Gatti,” Sal breathed beside me, his voice dropping an octave. He took his chauffeur’s cap off and held it against his chest. “Elena?”
Luca froze on the top step, looking back at Sal. “You know her?”
Before Sal could answer, small footsteps pattered across the hardwood floor inside. A little boy pushed his way past the older woman’s skirt and pressed his nose against the mesh of the screen door. He had a mop of dark curls and wore flannel pajamas covered in little blue trains.
In his hand, he held a heavy silver pocket watch by its chain, swinging it back and forth like a pendulum.
“Mommy!” the little boy piped up, his voice bright and sleepy. “Look! Nonna let me hold Papa’s shiny clock!”
Luca wasn’t looking at the boy’s face. His eyes were locked on the silver pocket watch swinging in the porch light—a thick vintage piece with a deep dent on the lower rim and a family crest engraved into the silver.
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Luca’s hand went slowly to the inside pocket of his suit jacket, as if checking for something he knew was buried in a cemetery.
“Sal,” Luca whispered, his voice shaking for the first time that night. “That’s my brother Marco’s watch. The one he was wearing the night the Bellinis killed him.”
