Chapter 4 - A Different Table
I blinked, unsure if I had heard him correctly. "Sir?"
"Take off the apron," Luca repeated, standing up from behind the massive walnut desk. "You're done cleaning this house."
A sudden wave of heat rushed into my cheeks, accompanied by a cold pit of fear in my stomach. "Mr. Moretti, if I overstepped tonight—if speaking out in the dining room embarrassed you—I apologize. I only wanted to protect Marco. I need this job. I have rent, and—"
"You're not fired," Luca interrupted, walking around the desk. He stood a few feet away, tall and imposing in his tailored charcoal tuxedo, though he had loosened his black bow tie. "You're being reassigned."
He looked down at the black inventory binder on the desk.
"You read Italian fluently," he said. "Not just standard conversational Italian, but the northern regional business dialects. You know how to track supply-chain logs. You noticed an inventory discrepancy of twenty bottles of wine while managing a household of eight staff members, and you preserved evidentiary documents without compromising an active investigation."
"My mother ran the front-of-house and the accounting for our restaurant for twenty-six years," I said, my voice dropping lower. "She taught me double-entry bookkeeping before I was twelve. If you don't watch the back door, the kitchen will eat your profit margin by midnight."
A faint, genuine smile touched the corners of Luca's mouth—the first time I had ever seen it in the eight months I had worked under his roof.
"My grandfather used to say the exact same thing," Luca murmured. He turned toward the window, looking out into the rain-swept darkness of Lake Shore Drive, where the red tail lights of departing cars blurred in the mist. "Vanessa was right about one thing. The board meeting for the Grand Pier expansion is this Friday. The Bellinis aren't the only ones trying to sink it. There are three logistics subcontractors with ties to local shipping syndicates who want to control the terminal leasing."
He turned back to face me.
"I have six corporate accountants with Ivy League degrees who couldn't find a forged manifest if it was stapled to their foreheads, because they don't understand how workers actually skim from the floor. They look at spreadsheets. They don't look at the back door."
"You want me to audit the harbor manifests?" I asked, incredulous.
"I want you to work directly for me as an operations analyst," Luca corrected. "You will have an office on the forty-second floor of the Moretti Tower. Your salary will be four times what you make here. You will report to me, and only to me."
My breath caught in my throat. Four times my salary meant I could finally move out of my damp garden apartment in Pilsen. It meant health insurance that actually covered dental. It meant stepping out of the shadows of service elevators and back-hallway pantries.
"And if the board asks why your former housekeeper is reviewing their shipping manifests?" I asked.
"I will tell them you are an efficiency auditor who speaks the language of the people trying to rob us," Luca said without hesitation. "Do you accept?"
I untied the strings of my charcoal apron. I folded it neatly in half, then into quarters, and set it down on the edge of the walnut desk next to the Bellini stationery.
"I accept, Mr. Moretti."
"Good," Luca said. "You start tomorrow at six in the morning. David Vance will drive you to the terminal. But first, you're going to eat."
"Sir, I can get something in the kitchen—"
"Emma," he said, his voice quiet, leaving no room for argument. "The dining room is empty. The lamb is probably cold, but Marco left three platters of risotto in the warmer, and there is a bottle of '97 Tignanello that Vanessa's driver didn't manage to steal. Sit back down at the table."
Ten minutes later, the grand dining hall was silent.
Luca had dismissed the remaining kitchen staff, telling them to leave the cleanup for the morning crew. He carried two porcelain plates from the kitchen himself, setting one in front of me and taking the seat directly opposite, where thirty minutes earlier his fiancée had sat planning Marco's ruin.
He poured two glasses of the deep, ruby wine. He pushed one toward me.
"To telling the truth," Luca said, raising his glass. "Even when it costs nine thousand six hundred dollars."
I lifted my glass, the crystal catching the low chandelier light. "To watching the back door, Mr. Moretti."
We drank. The wine was rich, earthy, and layered with the taste of dark cherries and aged oak.
As I set the glass down, Luca looked at me with an intensity that made the breath catch in my chest. There was something new in the air between us—a crackling, fragile awareness that hadn't existed when I was just the girl polishing his mirrors. We were no longer master and servant; we were two people sitting in the wreckage of an ambush, preparing for an even larger war.
"Call me Luca," he said softly.
"Luca," I replied, testing the shape of the name on my tongue.
Before he could answer, the red landline phone on the sideboard—the secure line connected directly to the harbor night dispatch—let out a sharp, piercing ring.
Luca’s expression instantly turned hard. He stood up, crossed the room in three strides, and lifted the receiver.
"Moretti," he said.
He listened for ten seconds. His knuckles turned white against the black plastic.
"When?" Luca demanded. "Did anyone see the plates?"
Another pause. Luca’s jaw clenched so tightly the muscles knotted beneath his stubble.
"Seal the yard. Call the harbor police. I'm coming down now."
He slammed the receiver onto the cradle and turned to me. The quiet, civilized atmosphere of the dining room shattered into pieces.
"Enzo Bellini didn't wait for Friday," Luca said, grabbing his suit jacket from the back of the chair. "He just rammed a freight truck through Gate 4 at the South Terminal. And he didn't steal copper."
I stood up instantly. "What did he take?"
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"He didn't take anything," Luca said, his eyes burning with cold rage. "He planted three shipping containers of contraband in our bonded warehouse. He called the federal customs task force twenty minutes ago. They're on their way to raid the terminal right now."
***
