🥣 The Bowl of Soup That Exposed the Mafia Boss’s Fiancée

Chapter 12 - The Sister at My Door

Amelia Vale was nothing like me.

That was my first stupid thought when I walked into my father’s house and saw her standing beneath our cracked ceiling with a cashmere coat over one arm.

She had my mother’s mouth.

That was my second thought, and it nearly took my knees out from under me.

She was older than me by six years, slender, composed, with dark blond hair cut blunt at her shoulders and eyes that seemed trained to give comfort before receiving any. She looked like the kind of woman wealthy donors trusted with checks and secrets.

Then she saw my face.

Her composure cracked right down the middle.

“Oh,” she said.

It was not much. It was enough.

My father sat in his chair, exhausted and wrecked from crying. Mrs. Moretti stood beside him, one hand on his shoulder. Luca remained near the doorway, allowing my house to belong to my family even while his men guarded every entrance from the street.

Amelia held a folder against her chest.

“Salvatore called me,” she said. “Before he was taken.”

Luca’s eyes sharpened.

“What did he say?”

“That you had kidnapped Vanessa and invented a story about my birth to attack the foundation.”

“And you came here?” I asked.

She looked at my father.

“Because he also said James Carter was lying. I didn’t know that name. But when someone like Salvatore Bellini tells you not to look at a name, you learn where the door is.”

I wanted to like her for that.

I wanted not to.

Both things hurt.

My father reached toward her with his good hand.

“Emily.”

Amelia closed her eyes.

“No one has called me that.”

“My wife did,” he whispered.

She covered her mouth.

There are reunions people imagine with music under them. The real ones often happen in rooms too small for all the damage. Nobody knows where to stand. Nobody knows whether touching will heal or reopen.

I did not hug her.

She did not ask me to.

Instead she opened the folder.

“I brought foundation records. I think Bellini House has been used to move money through medical programs and shelters for years. I thought I was helping women disappear from dangerous men.”

Her voice broke.

“Some of them were being moved to dangerous men.”

Mrs. Moretti sat down slowly.

Luca looked like every light inside him had gone cold.

“Names,” he said.

Amelia nodded.

“Dates, drivers, properties, doctors, judges. I didn’t understand the pattern until this morning.”

She looked at me.

“I may have signed things I shouldn’t have signed.”

I wanted to be cruel. I had a right to be cruel. A stolen sister stood in my house wearing good wool while I counted pills and scrubbed other people’s floors.

But I saw her hands.

They were shaking.

“I’ve signed things I didn’t understand too,” I said quietly. “Usually payment plans.”

A terrible little laugh escaped her.

Then the front window shattered.

No gunshot. A brick.

It crashed across the floor wrapped in white paper.

Gabriel was there instantly, pulling Mrs. Moretti down, shouting orders. Luca pushed me behind the wall with one hand, his body between mine and the broken glass.

Amelia knelt and picked up the paper before anyone stopped her.

On it was written one sentence.

Bring the recording, or the next house burns with everyone inside.

Below that, in red marker, someone had drawn a bowl of soup.

My father began to wheeze.