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

Chapter 09 - The Dress in the Trunk

Luca wanted me taken to one of his safe houses.

I refused.

This was not bravery. I want that understood. Brave people stand tall because courage lifts them. I refused because the night had already taken too much from me, and if one more powerful man decided where I belonged for my own good, I thought I might break something expensive.

“No,” I said.

Luca stared at me in the church alley while rain slid down the collar of his black shirt.

“No?”

“I’m not cargo.”

“Someone put a copy of your uniform in a trunk.”

“Yes. I was present for that sentence.”

Gabriel looked away, which I suspected was his version of laughing.

Luca did not.

“If they dress a dead woman as you, they can claim you ran. They can claim you stole documents. They can claim whatever they need.”

“Then we should find Mrs. Moretti before they do any of that.”

“We?”

“Yes.”

He stepped closer, not enough to intimidate, enough to make sure I understood him.

“You are a housekeeper.”

“And tonight your housekeeper noticed the soup, the envelope, the napkin, and the fact that your mother wasn’t frightened on camera. How are your professionals doing?”

Gabriel coughed once into his fist.

Luca’s eyes did something dangerous and almost amused.

“You have a cruel mouth, Emma Carter.”

“I clean rich people’s toilets for a living, sir. It sharpens perspective.”

The old nursing home near Joliet crouched behind dead trees at the end of a service road. It had once been called Mercy Vale, though no mercy seemed to have survived the closure. Boards covered some windows. Others glowed faintly from inside.

We approached without headlights.

I stayed in the second car until Luca opened my door himself.

“You do exactly what I say from here.”

“No.”

His jaw flexed.

“You do exactly what keeps you alive.”

“That I can consider.”

Inside, the air smelled of mildew, old disinfectant, and electricity. A generator thumped somewhere below. We moved through corridors where abandoned wheelchairs sat like witnesses.

At the end of the west hall, voices drifted through a cracked door.

Vanessa’s voice.

“You were supposed to leave the city. That was the arrangement.”

Mrs. Moretti answered softly.

“I don’t make arrangements with women who insult soup.”

Despite everything, something in my chest loosened.

Luca closed his eyes for half a second. Relief, when he allowed himself to feel it, looked almost painful.

Then another voice spoke.

Salvatore Bellini.

“You should have stayed in your little kitchen, Caterina.”

Luca’s expression became stone.

We listened.

Bellini wanted the recording. Mrs. Moretti claimed she no longer had it. Vanessa sounded less certain than her father. That interested me. She was cruel, ambitious, shallow in certain ways, but not entirely informed. Perhaps powerful fathers kept daughters polished instead of trusted.

“Luca will come,” Mrs. Moretti said.

Bellini laughed.

“Your son is busy protecting the maid. By dawn, she will be the scandal, and you will be a confused old woman who wandered off in grief.”

Luca moved.

Gabriel caught his arm.

Not yet, his eyes said.

Then Mrs. Moretti said, “Emma is not the weak point.”

My heart stumbled at my own name in her mouth.

“She is the proof.”

Vanessa snapped, “Proof of what?”

There was a pause.

Then Mrs. Moretti said, “That Marco was not the only child your father stole.”