🥖 The Baker Who Threw Flour at the Mafia Boss and Found His Secret

Chapter 05 - The Brother Nobody Buried

Matteo moved before the glass finished falling.

One moment he stood beside the table.

The next, he had Sofia on the floor behind the counter and his body between her and the broken window.

Alessia grabbed me by the apron and yanked me down hard enough to steal my breath.

Outside, his men shouted.

A car screamed away from the curb.

The entire bakery smelled of sugar, gunpowder, and ruined lemon.

I looked at the cake scattered across the tile.

It was absurd what the mind chose in crisis.

Not the bullet hole.

Not Sofia’s silent terror.

Not Matteo’s hand inside his jacket.

The cake.

I had zested four lemons for that cake.

“Are you hit?” Matteo asked.

I blinked at him.

“What?”

“Emily.”

His voice cut cleanly through the ringing in my ears.

“Are you hit?”

“No.”

His eyes moved across my face, my shoulders, my arms, checking anyway.

“Alessia?”

“I’m fine.”

“Sofia?”

The girl stared at the broken window.

“I’m fine,” she whispered.

But she was not.

None of us were.

The bullet had come through the front glass at chest height. If we had still been standing, if Matteo had not stopped me at the door, if Alessia had not pulled me down—

I stopped that thought before it finished.

Matteo’s men burst inside.

“Black sedan,” one said. “No plates. Headed west.”

“Find it.”

The man nodded and vanished.

Matteo looked at the photograph still in his hand.

The message was no longer only a warning.

It was proof someone had been watching long enough to know when to place the envelope.

And when to shoot.

“My apartment is upstairs,” I said.

“No.”

“It’s not a question.”

“No,” Matteo repeated. “It is not safe.”

“I live there.”

“Not tonight.”

Something in me snapped—not loudly, not beautifully, but with the tired ugliness of a woman who had been pushed once too often before breakfast.

“You don’t get to walk into my bakery, call me your girlfriend, get flour on your suit, drag your family mystery into my walls, and then decide where I sleep.”

Sofia looked at me with enormous eyes.

Matteo lowered his voice.

“I am trying to keep you alive.”

“I was doing a perfectly acceptable job of that before you started drinking my coffee.”

“That bullet disagrees.”

I wanted to argue.

I hated that he was right.

We climbed the back stairs together. Matteo went first, which annoyed me until I realized he was checking corners before I reached them.

My apartment above the bakery was three rooms, one slanted ceiling, and a water heater that made noise like a dying accordion.

Matteo paused in the doorway.

It was the first time I had seen him unsure where to put his body.

Men like him belonged in boardrooms, church funerals, leather back seats, dark restaurants with private entrances.

Not in a kitchen with chipped mugs and grocery lists stuck to the refrigerator with magnets shaped like fruit.

Sofia walked straight to the small bookshelf near my window.

“You have old cookbooks.”

“I have insomnia and thrift stores.”

She touched the spine of one carefully.

For a child raised around money, she handled my cheap things with more respect than most adults.

Alessia noticed it too.

Her expression softened.

Then hardened when her phone buzzed.

She read the message and went pale.

“What is it?” Matteo asked.

She handed him the phone.

I watched his face shut down.

On the screen was a message from an unknown number.

Bring the tin to Saint Brigid’s by noon or the girl learns how her mother screamed.

Sofia saw only enough to understand.

Her breathing changed.

Matteo turned the phone away, but too late.

“She screamed?” Sofia asked.

“No,” Alessia said too quickly.

Sofia looked at Matteo.

“Don’t lie to me.”

For the first time since I had met him, Matteo looked helpless.

Not weak.

Helpless, which is different and far more human.

I knelt in front of Sofia.

“Adults lie badly when they are scared.”

Her eyes filled.

“Did my mom die?”

I could not answer.

Matteo could not answer either.

So Sofia did the most heartbreaking thing.

She steadied herself.

Like a child deciding her own fear was inconvenient to everyone else.

“We have to go to Saint Brigid’s,” she said.

“No,” Matteo said.

“Yes.” Her voice trembled but did not break. “If she left something, she left it for me.”

Matteo looked toward me, as if he expected me to side with him.

I almost did.

Then I thought of my grandmother keeping a key for fifty years. Of Lucia coming to my bakery with a tin and a secret. Of women hiding truth inside recipes because men had taught them every official door was dangerous.

“She’s right,” I said.

Matteo stared at me.

“You are making this worse.”

“No. I’m making it honest.”

His jaw flexed.

Below us, police sirens finally arrived far too late.

Matteo looked at the broken bakery window, then at the girl who had stopped being a child for the third time in one morning.

“All right,” he said.