Chapter 2 - THE SILVER KEY AND THE ASHES
The dining room was so silent I could hear the tall grandfather clock ticking in the foyer. Thirty of Chicago’s wealthiest power brokers sat frozen around the long mahogany table, their crystal wineglasses untouched.
Luca stared down at the yellowed envelope resting beside his silver charger plate. His father’s handwriting looked dark and urgent, even after twenty years: IF ANYTHING HAPPENS TO ME.
Before Luca’s fingers could touch the paper, Vanessa lunged across the white tablecloth.
Her manicured nails caught the edge of the envelope, dragging it toward her plate. In her haste, her elbow struck her crystal flute. Champagne spilled across the damask linen, soaking into the bottom corner of the envelope.
“Luca, please, don’t do this here,” Vanessa said, her voice shrill and breathless. She pressed both palms flat over the envelope. “Look around you. The mayor’s chief of staff is at this table. The board of the shipping cartel is watching. Whatever grievance this old union man has against my father, it does not belong at our engagement dinner.”
Luca didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to.
“Take your hands off my father’s letter, Vanessa.”
“He’s manipulating you!” She looked wildly around the table, trying to rally the guests. “My father and your father had business disputes thirty years ago. Everyone in the garment and freight districts knows that. If you open this in front of thirty people, you humiliate my family and destroy the merger before the ink is even dry.”
Beside me, Frank Marino didn’t flinch. His arthritic hands rested calmly on the dented metal lid of his lunch pail. “Michael Moretti didn’t own a business, Miss Bellini. He fixed forklifts for nineteen dollars an hour. What kind of business dispute does a billionaire syndicate boss have with a shift mechanic?”
“Get him out!” Vanessa snapped, turning her glare on me. “Emma, I gave you a direct order ten minutes ago. Call security and have him removed, or pack your locker tonight!”
My heart hammered against my ribs. I thought of my dad sitting in his wheelchair in our small ground-floor apartment on the South Side, waiting for me to bring home the groceries and his blood thinner medication. Losing this job meant losing our lease within sixty days.
Before I could take a step back, Luca stood up.
He reached across the table, took Vanessa by the wrist—firmly, without hurting her, yet with a strength that made her gasp—and lifted her hand off the envelope.
“Emma works for me,” Luca said, his dark eyes locked on Vanessa’s pale face. “And tonight, she is the only person in this house who remembered who my father was.”
He picked up a heavy silver butter knife and slid the blade beneath the wax-and-glue seal of the envelope.
Inside was a single sheet of lined notebook paper, folded around something small and heavy that clinked against the china plate when it fell out.
It was a tarnished brass locker key stamped with the number 414, attached to a broken silver chain—and dangling from that same chain was a tiny silver St. Christopher medal, blackened on one side by fire.
I gasped before I could stop myself.
Luca looked up at me sharply. “Emma?”
My knees felt weak. I reached up to the collar of my black housekeeper’s uniform and pulled out the thin silver chain I wore around my neck. Hanging from it was the exact same style of tarnished St. Christopher medal, with the exact same weld mark on the bail.
“My father has the twin to that medal,” I whispered, my voice shaking. “He told me his best friend gave it to him the night he pulled him out of a burning loading dock on Cicero Avenue.”
Frank Marino turned his head slowly toward me. His faded blue eyes widened behind his glasses. “Reed,” the old man murmured, studying my face beneath my pinned-back hair. “Wait a minute. You’re Arthur Reed’s daughter?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “He drove the night-shift delivery rig for Midway Freight.”
Frank’s hand trembled as he reached out and touched my arm. “Girl, your father didn’t just pull Michael out of that fire. Your father took a falling steel beam across his back holding the bay door open so Michael could crawl through. We were told Arthur Reed died in the ambulance on the way to Cook County Hospital.”
“He didn’t die,” I said, a cold chill washing over my skin. “He was in a coma for four months. When he woke up, two men in dark coats came to his hospital room, paid off his medical bills in cash, and told him if he ever contacted the Moretti family or spoke to the fire marshal, I wouldn’t make it to my tenth birthday.”
Across the table, an older man with silver hair and a tailored pinstripe suit abruptly stood up, his napkin falling to the floor. It was Enzo Bellini—Vanessa’s father, sitting three seats down on the right.
“Luca,” Enzo said, his gravelly voice cutting through the murmurs of the guests. “Step into the study with me. Right now. Before you read a dead man’s confusion aloud and start a war neither of us can stop.”
Luca unfolded the lined notebook paper and read the first three lines silently. When he lifted his eyes to Enzo Bellini, the color had drained completely from his face.
“My father wasn’t confused, Enzo,” Luca said, his voice dropping to a deadly whisper. “He writes here that the warehouse fire wasn’t set to burn him out. It was set to destroy the shipping manifest inside Trailer 19—and that the man who locked the bay doors from the outside wasn’t a Bellini.”
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Luca turned slowly toward the head of the table, where his own uncle and consigliere, Victor Moretti, was sitting with a half-empty glass of scotch.
“It says the doors were padlocked by my father’s own brother.”
