Chương 3 - Footsteps in the Dark
The rain returned on Tuesday night, drumming against the slate mansard roofs of the estate with the fury of a thousand miniature hammers.
It was two in the morning.
I couldn't sleep. The attic room was cold; the cast-iron radiator clanked and hissed, producing plenty of noise but very little steam. Lily was dead to the world, sprawled diagonally across the mattress, her arms flung wide as if embracing the ceiling.
My throat was parched.
Slipping into my thick wool dressing gown and soft-soled slippers, I took the brass candlestick from the bedside table and stepped out into the corridor. The service stairs were steep and narrow, winding through the spine of the house like an artery.
I didn't turn on the electric lamps. In a house where men with machine guns stood behind the rhododendron bushes, sudden lights in the middle of the night invited unwanted attention. I knew the layout by heart: six steps down to the landing, turn left, four steps down to the pantry access.
I pushed open the heavy baize door that led into the kitchen.
The room was vast, dark, illuminated only by the rhythmic flash of the blue security monitor mounted near the service bay.
I poured a glass of cold water from the copper filter, the liquid soothing my raw throat.
Then I heard it.
*Thump. Thump. Thump.*
The sound was coming from the portrait gallery—the long, vaulted hall that led to the abandoned solarium. It was a heavy, irregular rhythm. Not a patrol guard. A patrol guard walked with the measured, four-beat step of an infantryman.
This was the walk of a wounded animal pacing a cage.
I should have gone back up the stairs. I should have shut my door, turned the brass bolt, and pulled the scratchy wool blanket over my ears. A maid who investigates noises in a mafia stronghold does not live long enough to collect her pension.
Instead, I set the water glass on the counter.
My feet moved on their own accord.
The portrait gallery was lined with dark walnut paneling, the floor covered by an ancient runner of Ispahan silk that swallowed the sound of my slippers. The air grew colder the further I walked from the kitchen, smelling less of wood smoke and more of dried rose petals, damp stone, and the unmistakable metallic bite of oxidized lead.
At the far end of the gallery, the double doors of the solarium stood open.
A single silver beam of moonlight cut through the rain-streaked glass dome above, illuminating a room that was entirely empty of furniture. The walls were lined with bare brick; the floor was raw, unpolished flagstone.
In the center of the room, standing directly beneath the leaking glass dome, was Dominic Moretti.
He wore no jacket. No waistcoat. Only a thin white linen shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, the sleeves shoved back to his biceps. In his right hand, he held a heavy crystal tumbler filled with two inches of amber whiskey. In his left hand, hanging limp at his side, was a framed photograph.
He was not drinking. He was just standing there, letting the cold condensation from the glass dome drip onto his bare shoulders.
"You're out of bed, Isabella."
He didn't turn around. He hadn't heard me approach—I was certain of it. The silk runner had absorbed every movement.
Yet he knew.
I stopped ten feet behind him, my heart skittering against my ribs like a trapped moth. "I came down for water, Mr. Moretti. I heard footsteps."
"Did you think it was an intruder?" His voice was hoarse, rough from smoke or silence. He finally took a slow sip of the whiskey, his broad back muscles flexing beneath the linen. "There are sixteen men stationed within the perimeter walls. If someone made it this far into the house, your water glass would be the least of your concerns."
"I wasn't afraid of an intruder," I said before I could stop myself.
Dominic turned his head slowly. The moonlight caught the high, sharp edge of his cheekbone, casting the rest of his face in profound shadow. "Then what were you afraid of?"
"You," I whispered. "And what you do to yourself in the dark."
The words hung in the cold, wet air of the solarium.
It was an unforgivable insolence. A maid did not speak to Don Moretti about his soul. Men had been found in the Charles River for speaking to him with far less familiarity.
Dominic turned his entire body toward me. He didn't look angry; he looked exhausted. The circles beneath his eyes were black as bruises. The hand holding the picture frame tightened until the skin over his knuckles turned translucent.
"Do you know what this room was, Isabella?" he asked quietly.
I shook my head. "No, sir."
"It was a conservatory," he said, his voice devoid of music. "Elena... Elena loved orchids. She had them brought from Brazil, from Colombia. She had misting systems installed. She spent ten hours a day here, humming songs that made no sense."
Elena.
The name was never spoken in the house. I had seen her portrait once, hidden in a dusty recess of the third-floor storage room—a woman with delicate features, pale golden hair, and eyes that looked too gentle to survive the concrete streets of Boston. Leo’s mother.
"She died five years ago," Dominic continued, his gaze drifting toward the glass dome where the rain was beating a frantic tattoo. "Leo was eighteen months old. He doesn't remember her face. He only remembers that one day the music stopped, and the room became cold."
"He remembers that she loved him," I said softly, taking a single step forward. "Children remember the shape of love even when the details are gone."
Dominic let out a short, ugly bark of a laugh. It sounded like rusted iron snapping.
"Is that what you tell yourself?" He lifted the photograph in his hand, turning it toward me.
In the frame was a picture of Elena holding a newborn Leo. But the glass was cracked—a spiderweb of fractures originating from the center of Elena’s chest.
"She didn't die of a sickness, Isabella," Dominic said, his voice dropping into a register so dark it made the stone floor beneath my feet feel unsteady. "The newspapers said it was heart failure. The police report said it was sudden arrhythmia."
He stepped closer to me. The smell of whiskey, rain, and tobacco washed over me. He stopped so close that I could feel the heat radiating from his chest through his damp linen shirt.
"A car bomb," he whispered. "Intended for me. At the corner of Boylston and Tremont. I had stepped out of the vehicle for thirty seconds to enter a tobacconist. She was sitting in the back seat with Leo in her arms."
I gasped, my hand flying to my mouth.
"The blast threw Leo through the window into an awning," Dominic said, every word dropping from his lips like a lead weight. "He didn't have a scratch on him. Just a smudge of soot across his cheek. But Elena... Elena burned."
He raised his tumbler and swallowed the rest of the whiskey in one violent gulp.
"Every time I look at my son," Dominic whispered, his gray eyes pinning me to the floor, "I see the reason she died. And every time he looks at me, he sees the man who killed her."
"No," I breathed, my eyes filling with sudden, hot tears. "No, Mr. Moretti. That isn't what he sees."
"You don't know what he sees," Dominic snarled, a sudden flare of the terrifying Don breaking through the grief. "You have been here for eight months! You know nothing of this life! In my world, love is a hostage! If you care for something, someone will take a cleaver to it to make you crawl! I kept him cold because cold things don't break! If he loves nothing, if he expects nothing, they cannot hurt him!"
"And look at him!" I cried out, forgetting who he was, forgetting that he held the power of life and death over my small family. "Look at him, Dominic! He is already broken! He is six years old and he walks through this house like he’s already dead! You think you’re protecting him from your enemies? You’re executing him yourself, an inch at a time!"
The silence that followed was terrifying.
The use of his first name hung between us like a drawn blade.
Dominic stood frozen, his chest heaving, his jaw clenched so hard I thought his teeth would splinter. For three agonizing seconds, I was certain he was going to strike me. His hand—large, scarred across the knuckles—drifted toward his hip.
I didn't step back.
I stood there in my cheap wool robe, shivering from the draft, looking up into the eyes of a monster who was suffocating inside his own cage.
Then, Dominic’s hand fell to his side.
The crystal glass slipped from his fingers, shattering into dozens of glittering shards against the limestone flagstones. He didn't look down at the broken glass. He didn't look at the spilled whiskey.
He simply looked at me, his eyes wide, hollow, and terribly, terribly human.
"What am I supposed to do?" he whispered.
The question wasn't an order. It wasn't the command of a boss. It was the desperate cry of a drowning man asking for a rope.
"Let him laugh," I said, my voice trembling with an emotion I could no longer name. "Even if it makes you remember the fire. Let him laugh, Dominic. Because if you don't, the bomb didn't just kill Elena. It killed you both."
Dominic stood motionless in the moonlight for what felt like an eternity. The rain beat against the glass overhead, washing away the world outside.
Finally, he closed his eyes.
"Go to bed, Isabella," he said, his voice so quiet it was barely audible above the storm. "Go back to your daughter."
I hesitated. I looked at the broken glass near his bare feet.
"Go," he repeated, not opening his eyes. "Before the sun comes up."
May you like
I turned and walked away down the silk runner, my heart hammering against my ribs, knowing with absolute, terrifying certainty that my life would never be the same again.
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