Chapter 1 - The Booth at Beluchi’s
The glass doors of Beluchi’s were heavy, beveled crystal that rattled faintly against their brass frames when I shoved them open.
Rain had soaked through my scrub jacket, turning the St. Catherine’s embroidery against my chest into a stiff, cold slab of cotton. My breath hitched in my throat, ragged and burning from the dead sprint I had made across four avenue blocks against the biting Manhattan drizzle.
I didn’t look at the maître d’. I didn’t look at the chandeliers dripping teardrops of warm amber light over white linen tables.
I looked only for red.
And there she was.
Sitting in a deep, curved booth upholstered in midnight-blue leather, her tiny legs sticking straight out, the hems of her yellow rain boots barely reaching past the cushion. A smear of whipped cream rested across her cupid’s bow like a mustache. Beside her, slumped against the salt shaker, sat Mr. Buttons—her one-eared, nearly furless stuffed rabbit, looking like a weary chaperone who had long since given up on discipline.
Across from her sat Dominic Moretti.
Every instinct honed over six years in trauma triage warned me of predators. Some men occupied space; Dominic Moretti altered its density. He wore an unbuttoned charcoal overcoat over a tailored black suit, his crisp white collar open at the throat without a tie, exposing the hard angle of his clavicle. On his left wrist, a platinum Audemars Piguet caught the low light. His hair was cropped close at the sides, shot through with strands of silver at the temples, though he couldn't have been more than thirty-eight.
He was not checking his phone. He was not looking around for an exit.
He was listening to my five-year-old child as though she were delivering the State of the Union address.
“Lily!” My voice cracked, splitting the hush of the dining room. Several patrons turned, forks poised midway to their mouths, but I didn't care.
Lily swung her legs and beamed. “Mommy! Look, they have little marshmallows that look like snowballs!”
I crossed the dining floor in five frantic strides, dropping hard to my knees against the carpet. My hands trembled violently as I seized Lily by the shoulders, checking her ears, her neck, the small hands sticky with melted chocolate.
“What were you thinking?” The whisper tore out of me, a mixture of nausea and hysterical relief. “What did you do, Lily? How did you get here?”
“Taxi,” she chirped, completely unbothered by my terror.
My stomach cratered. “A taxi?”
“I took twelve dollars from the piggy bank with the broken snout,” she explained earnestly, tapping a finger on the table. “I walked to the corner by the flower shop, raised my hand like you do when we go to the museum, and told the yellow car man to take me to the restaurant with the pretty B on the door. Because you were sad you were going to be late.”
*Twelve dollars. A Manhattan sidewalk. A five-year-old alone.*
I buried my face in her damp hair, inhaling the scent of baby shampoo and stale rain. My shift in the ER had run four hours over because an intercity charter bus had hydroplaned across three lanes on the Queensboro Bridge, flooding our bays with crushed extremities and internal hemorrhages. I had called my elderly neighbor, Mrs. Delaney, begging her to stay with Lily and to ring Beluchi’s to cancel the blind date my overbearing sister had set up through some obscure, high-end matchmaker.
Mrs. Delaney must have fallen asleep. And Lily, possessing the relentless, terrifying initiative of a child who hated seeing her mother cry over an unpaid electric bill, had decided to stand in for me.
“She’s safe, Elena.”
The voice was low, gravelly, and entirely composed.
I froze. Then, slowly, still kneeling on the plush carpet, I looked up.
Dominic had not shifted. His dark eyes—the color of espresso beans before they are ground—held mine with a steady, unblinking intensity. There was no mockery in his posture. No irritation. His cup of espresso had gone completely cold, the dark crema congealed into an unbroken skin across the rim.
He had waited fifty-five minutes.
“I am… so sorry,” I stammered, scrambling to my feet and smoothing down my wrinkled scrub pants. “I don't even know what to say. I’ll pay for whatever she had, I’ll—”
“Sit down,” he said softly.
It wasn't an order delivered with barked malice; it was an invitation that carried the gravitational weight of a stone dropping into water.
“We have to go. I need to take her home,” I said, clutching Lily’s hand so tightly her knuckles paled.
“Sit down for two minutes, Elena. You're shaking so badly your knees are knocking together. Catch your breath.”
He waved one finger toward the waiter hovering near the archway. Instantly, as if summoned by psychic wire, the server approached, laid down a tall glass of sparkling water with lemon, and vanished without a word.
I slid into the booth beside Lily, my chest heaving beneath the damp scrub top. “Lily, put your coat on. Now.”
“Mr. Dominic bought me hot chocolate with two bowls of cream,” Lily reported, leaning her chin on Mr. Buttons’ head. “And I told him about you.”
A cold dread trickled down the back of my neck. “What did you tell him?”
Lily counted on her sticky fingers. “That you sleep with the TV on when you’re sad. That you sing terribly in the shower, like a dying frog. That you hide the emergency chocolate behind the frozen broccoli because you think I won’t look there, but I do.”
“Lily,” I gasped, the blood rushing into my cheeks.
“And,” she added, looking squarely at Dominic, “that you cry after you think I’m asleep, especially when the envelopes with the red letters arrive.”
My heart stopped. The air vanished from my lungs. The shame was a physical blow, heavy and suffocating. In this opulent dining room, where men wore suits worth more than my annual rent, my poverty and private despair had just been cataloged by a five-year-old.
Dominic did not smile. He didn’t pity me with a softened brow, either. His gaze remained level, uncomfortably penetrating.
“Sweetheart,” I whispered, my voice trembling, “we don’t tell strangers our business.”
“He’s not a stranger,” Lily protested, furrowing her brow. “He knew your name before I said it. And he knew about Daddy.”
The restaurant noise—the clink of silverware, the murmur of smooth jazz, the hum of the kitchen doors swinging open—dropped into utter silence.
Every tendon in my neck went rigid.
I looked at Dominic.
His calm demeanor had tightened into something razor-thin and dangerous. His fingers, resting casually on the polished mahogany tabletop, had stilled.
“What did she tell you?” I asked, the words barely audible.
“She didn't have to tell me much,” Dominic replied, his voice dropping into an intimate, velvet timbre that made the tiny hairs on my arms stand up. “She just told me that Julian didn't leave because he stopped loving you.”
The air left the room entirely.
Julian.
She had said his name.
I hadn’t spoken Julian’s name to the matchmaker. My sister didn't even use his name anymore; to her, he was just *the dead mistake*. My husband had been buried four years ago under a nondescript slab in Green-Wood Cemetery, his death ruled an unresolved hit-and-run in an industrial park in Red Hook.
“How do you know that name?” My voice was no longer embarrassed; it was cold, defensive, and sharp as a scalpel.
Dominic leaned back against the dark leather. The playboy exterior vanished like mist under an industrial spotlight. The silhouette of a man who ruled the concrete underpinnings of this city remained.
May you like
“Julian Vance didn't die in a random accident, Elena,” Dominic said, his dark eyes locking onto mine with the finality of a prison door slamming shut. “And you didn't end up at this table tonight by chance.”
***
