Chapter 5 - THE TRAITOR AT TABLE FOUR
I stared at Arthur in disbelief. The balding, spectacles-wearing man who used to scold me for slicing lemons too thickly was standing in Elena Caruso’s bedroom with a deadly stillness in his posture.
"Arthur?" I breathed, backing up until my spine hit the cedar wall of the closet. "What are you doing here?"
"He’s not a restaurant manager," Damian said coldly, stepping entirely in front of me to shield my body with his own. "Are you, Arturo? You worked for my uncle Matteo in Naples thirty years ago before you supposedly retired."
Arthur offered a thin, humorless smile, resting the heavy iron poker against his palm. "Donna Livia pays considerably better than a pension, Damian. And she prefers to keep an eye on liabilities."
"Liabilities?" I echoed, my voice shaking with anger. "You hired me six months ago! You told me you were giving a widow a fresh start!"
"I was ordered to bring you from Zurich to Milan and keep you on a short leash where Donna Livia could watch you," Arthur said matter-of-factly. "You wouldn't stop filing petitions with the Swiss health ministry to unseal your baby’s hospital records. Donna Livia knew if you stayed in Zurich, you’d eventually bribe the right clerk. So I offered you a visa, an apartment, and a job at a restaurant three blocks from her estate. Everything was fine until Damian changed his dinner reservation tonight from the private club to my dining room."
My stomach twisted violently. For half a year, I had thanked this man every Friday when he handed me my paycheck. He had brought me soup when I had the flu. And all along, he was my jailer.
"Livia sent you up here to finish what she started in Zurich," Damian said, his muscles coiling like a predator about to strike.
"Not the girl—just the watch and the papers," Arthur corrected, gesturing toward Julian’s pocket watch in Damian’s hand with the tip of the iron poker. "Donna Livia realized after locking the door that Elena’s vanity hadn't been cleared out. Hand over the envelope and the watch, Damian. Let me take the waitress downstairs to the waiting police car. She goes to a psychiatric ward for a few years, and your family name stays clean. Fight me, and I scream that she attacked me with this poker while trying to abduct Leah."
In the nursery just ten feet away, the mahogany crib creaked.
Little bare feet padded softly across the hardwood floor. Before either of us could stop her, Leah appeared in the doorway of the nursery, rubbing her eyes with one fist and dragging her torn velvet rabbit by the ear with the other.
"Mama?" she mumbled sleepily. Then she saw Arthur holding the iron bar, and her small body went rigid.
She didn't cry. Instead, she pointed a tiny, trembling finger straight at Arthur’s chest and whimpered two words that made the air freeze in my lungs:
"Bad man."
Damian’s head snapped toward his daughter. "What did you just say, Leah?"
Leah scrambled backward until she was pressed against my legs, hiding her face in my skirt. "Bad man," she cried, her voice cracking with sheer terror. "Loud noise! Bad man take Mama!"
I dropped to my knees and gathered her into my arms, my heart hammering against my ribs. "Wait," I whispered, staring at Damian over Leah’s curls. "You told me earlier that Leah hadn't spoken since a traumatic event two years ago. If she was just a newborn when she was taken from me in Zurich... what traumatic event made her stop talking?"
Damian’s eyes were fixed on Arthur with murderous intensity. "Six months ago, she was starting to babble words like any normal toddler—papa, acqua, luce. Then one afternoon in the garden at our lake house, the nanny left her alone for five minutes. When the nanny came back, Leah was hiding in the bushes, screaming hysterically. She never made another sound after that day."
Slowly, I looked back at Arthur. Six months ago was the exact week I had arrived in Milan.
"It wasn't six months ago that she saw me," Arthur said, though for the first time, a bead of sweat rolled down his temple. "Wait—"
"You brought Clara to the lake house before you set her up at the restaurant, didn't you?" Damian’s voice was a lethal whisper as he took a slow step forward. "You brought Clara to Livia so my mother could decide whether to kill her or keep her alive."
"Wait!" I gasped, a buried memory flashing behind my eyes. "When I first flew in from Zurich, Arthur picked me up at the airport. My coffee was bitter—I passed out in his car and woke up in my new apartment the next morning! You took me to the lake house while I was unconscious?"
"Donna Livia wanted to see your face!" Arthur snapped, backing up a step as Damian closed the distance between them. "The kid was playing on the balcony above the driveway! When she saw me dragging you out of the trunk, she started screaming Mama from the railing! I had to go up there and clamp my hand over her mouth so the guards wouldn't hear!"
Even at eighteen months old, she had recognized me. She had watched this man drag my unconscious body out of a car, thought I was dead, and locked her voice away in terror for six months.
Damian didn't say another word. He moved faster than I thought a man his size could move.
Arthur swung the iron poker wildly, catching Damian across the forearm with a sickening crack, but Damian didn't even flinch. He wrenched the iron bar from Arthur’s grip, slammed the man’s chest against the marble vanity, and pinned his throat with one massive forearm.
"Why did Livia keep Clara alive?" Damian snarled into Arthur’s purpling face. "If she killed her husband in Zurich, why didn't she kill Clara on the delivery table?!"
"Because of the blood!" Arthur choked out, clawing at Damian’s wrist. "The baby has the Bombay phenotype—the rarest blood type in the world! Only one in a million people have it! If the child ever got sick or got injured, she would bleed to death without a transfusion from her biological mother! Donna Livia couldn't kill the waitress—she was keeping her as a living blood bank!"
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Before Damian could press harder, Arthur’s hand fumbled inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a small brass key tethered to a red silk cord.
"And if you don't let me go," Arthur wheezed, a terrifying smile twisting his lips, "you'll never find out who the other half of that blood belongs to. Because Julian wasn't the father."
