🥂 The Maid Who Shattered the Champagne and Saved the Mafia Boss

Chapter 13 - The Grave Without a Name

Victor did not tell Lena what to do.

That surprised her.

Men like him usually mistook silence for weakness and choice for inefficiency. Yet he stood in Maribel’s small living room, rain tapping at the window, armed men in the stairwell, and waited while Lena held a phone to her ear and listened to Leon Mercer offer the kind of bargain devils probably found embarrassing.

Her aunt’s life for the microfilm.

Her mother’s grave for obedience.

Leon’s voice remained patient. “You have spent eighteen years not knowing where to bring flowers. I can fix that.”

Lena closed her eyes.

Victor’s voice was quiet beside her. “He doesn’t fix. He cages.”

Leon heard. “Still teaching servants philosophy, Victor?”

Lena opened her eyes. “Where is she?”

“Meet me where the city forgets its dead.”

Victor mouthed, No.

Leon continued, “Calvary Cemetery. Old maintenance gate. One hour. Bring the film. No Romano army, or your aunt receives visitors first.”

The line went dead.

Maribel crossed herself. “He always did like melodrama.”

Lena stared at her. “You knew him?”

“Not knew. Saw.” Maribel’s voice hardened. “Men like that came through hotel laundry thinking women pushing carts had no ears. Leon Mercer laughed the night your mother died.”

Victor looked toward Dmitri. “We go.”

Lena shook her head. “No Romano army, remember?”

“He expects me to disobey.”

“He expects you to think your way is the only way.”

Dmitri muttered, “It usually is.”

Lena looked at Victor. “Let me do it.”

“No.”

“There it is.”

“No,” he repeated. “Not because I command you. Because he wants you isolated and emotional.”

“I am isolated and emotional.”

“You are also the only person tonight who ruined every plan by noticing what powerful men assumed you would miss.”

That stopped her.

Victor took the microfilm from her open palm, wrapped it again, and handed it back.

“What do you want?” he asked.

Lena looked at Maribel. The old woman stood straight despite fear, one hand on the back of a chair as if it were the only thing keeping her from collapsing.

“I want my aunt safe.”

“She will be.”

“I want my mother’s grave.”

“We’ll get it.”

“I want Leon alive long enough to hear her name.”

Victor’s eyes darkened. “That may be difficult.”

“I didn’t say comfortable.”

At Calvary Cemetery, the maintenance gate hung crooked beneath old winter trees. Fog moved low across the grass, turning headstones into broken teeth. Lena arrived in a hotel delivery van driven by Dmitri’s youngest cousin, who looked twelve and claimed to be twenty-six.

Victor did not sit beside her.

He lay beneath a tarp among empty flower buckets and cursed softly every time the van hit a pothole.

“Still think this was elegant?” Lena whispered.

“No.”

“Good.”

She stepped out alone.

The cemetery seemed enormous in the dark.

Leon waited beside a stone angel missing one hand. He wore an overcoat now, still immaculate despite the rain. Beside him stood two men and a woman Lena recognized after a moment as the hotel’s assistant manager.

The woman held a gun with the misery of someone who had never wanted one and accepted one anyway.

Leon smiled. “You came.”

Lena held up the wax paper. “You talk first.”

“Your mother is buried under another name in a municipal plot. Angelo Romano ordered it.”

Victor, hidden in the van, went still.

Lena forced her voice to remain steady. “Name.”

Leon tilted his head. “Give me the film.”

“No.”

His smile thinned. “Bravery becomes tedious when overused.”

“So does blackmail.”

The assistant manager’s hand shook.

Lena looked at her. “He’ll kill you too.”

The woman’s eyes filled.

Leon sighed. “Staff are so dramatic tonight.”

He reached into his coat.

The van doors burst open.

Victor emerged like violence given shape.

Dmitri’s men came from the trees. Leon’s guards lifted weapons, but the assistant manager screamed and dropped hers. Shots cracked through the fog. Lena fell behind a headstone, clutching the microfilm against her chest.

Leon ran.

Not toward the road.

Toward the old chapel.

Victor followed.

Lena should have stayed down.

She did not.

Inside the chapel, Leon stood beneath a stained-glass saint with a gun pressed to Victor’s chest.

Victor had no weapon in his hands.