Chapter 3 - THE LOCKET
“No.”
The word came out automatically.
I gripped the locket.
“My mother gave this to me.”
“I believe you.”
“You just said it belonged to your father.”
“It did.”
Dante’s certainty made me angry.
“How could you possibly know?”
He looked at the scratched cross.
“I made that mark.”
I stopped breathing.
“When?”
“I was seventeen.”
Marco remained halfway down the staircase, watched by Dante’s men.
For once, even he had nothing sarcastic to say.
Dante continued.
“My father kept that medal on his key chain. He wasn’t religious. My mother was.”
He glanced at the initials.
“Carlo Moretti.”
C.M.
My hand closed around it.
“Why would he give it to my mother?”
“That is what I intend to find out.”
There was the cold boss again.
Intent.
Order.
Control.
I was suddenly exhausted by powerful men intending things around me.
“I’m going home.”
Dante stared at me.
“No.”
My spine straightened.
Marco actually smiled.
Dante shot him a look.
Then he corrected himself.
“Your apartment may not be safe.”
“Better.”
“What?”
“That sentence. It gives me information. It doesn’t pretend you own me.”
For the first time since he broke into that room, Dante Moretti looked caught off guard.
Then he inclined his head.
“Your apartment may not be safe. I have a secure guest floor at my house. You can stay there, or I can arrange a hotel under another name.”
Marco laughed softly.
“Look at you learning manners.”
Dante turned.
“If you continue talking, Marco, you’ll be learning how many teeth a man can lose while remaining conversational.”
“Dante.”
He looked back at me.
I hated that he listened when I said his name.
Because some part of me liked it.
“Don’t threaten people on my behalf.”
His jaw tightened.
“Fine.”
Marco looked delighted.
I pointed at him.
“You’re still a kidnapper.”
His smile disappeared.
“Fair.”
Dante’s guest floor won.
Not because I trusted him.
Because I knew exactly where Marco’s idea of hospitality led.
The Moretti house was not what I expected.
No marble lions.
No gold furniture.
It was an old stone mansion overlooking Lake Michigan, built in an era when Chicago millionaires apparently believed windows should be twelve feet tall.
Dante gave me a bedroom suite.
Then left.
No guard inside.
No locked door.
No instruction about where I could go.
I almost distrusted that more.
After a shower and clean clothes supplied by Dante’s housekeeper, I found him in the library.
The envelope lay open on his desk.
“So,” I said. “Now.”
He gestured toward a chair.
I stayed standing.
He accepted that too.
“The man beside your mother is Matteo Vitelli,” he said.
“Marco’s brother?”
“Yes.”
“He died?”
“Eighteen years ago.”
“When?”
“Two days before my father.”
I looked again at the photograph.
“My mother knew both of them.”
“Yes.”
“Doing what?”
“St. Agnes Community Trust.”
“That sounds like a charity.”
“It was.”
“Was?”
Dante looked toward the fire.
“My father and Matteo created it.”
That surprised me.
“Together?”
“Our families weren’t always enemies.”
“What happened?”
“Matteo was killed.”
“And Marco blamed your family.”
“Yes.”
“Then your father died.”
“I blamed his.”
The simplicity of it sounded horrifying.
Two deaths.
Two grieving families.
Eighteen years of hatred.
“What did St. Agnes do?”
“Legitimate housing. Medical assistance. Job training.”
“For whose families?”
His eyes held mine.
“Mostly ours.”
I understood.
People trying to leave the criminal world.
Widows.
Children.
Men who had served prison sentences and wanted something else.
“My father wanted parts of our organization gone,” Dante said. “Matteo agreed.”
“Which parts?”
“The worst ones.”
He didn’t dress it up.
I respected that despite myself.
“Your mother kept the books.”
I stared.
“She was an accountant?”
“Yes.”
“She told me she worked in medical billing.”
“She did later.”
Another life.
My quiet, tired mother had once kept books for two mafia families trying to dismantle part of themselves.
I sank into the chair.
“What was the ledger Marco kept asking about?”
“The Mercy Ledger.”
“Why Mercy?”
“The trust’s internal name.”
“What was in it?”
“All the money being moved out of criminal businesses and into legitimate programs.”
“That doesn’t sound worth killing people over.”
“The first section wasn’t.”
“And the second?”
Dante’s expression changed.
“Your mother apparently discovered someone was stealing from it.”
“How much?”
“Millions.”
I laughed once, without humor.
“My mother died owing the hospital forty-seven thousand dollars.”
Something in Dante’s face tightened.
“She never touched the money?”
“She died in a rented apartment with a broken dishwasher.”
That answer seemed to disturb him.
Good.
It disturbed me too.
“What did the envelope say besides the photograph?”
Dante handed me a single card.
Typed in black ink:
YOUR FATHER DIED FOR LAURA CHASE’S LIE.
HER DAUGHTER HAS WHAT SHE STOLE.
MIDNIGHT ENDS THE TRUCE.
“That’s why Marco kidnapped me?”
“He believed you had the ledger.”
“And you?”
“I believed Marco was trying to provoke me.”
“You didn’t believe the part about me?”
“No.”
That should have irritated me.
Instead I heard something else.
“You thought I really was nobody.”
His eyes met mine.
“I thought you were an innocent server someone had pulled into a war.”
“And now?”
“Now I think your mother spent eighteen years making sure you stayed outside it.”
The words hurt.
Because they sounded like love.
The kind my mother practiced quietly.
Protecting me without ever telling me there had been something to fear.
I touched the locket.
“Could this open something?”
Dante came around the desk.
“May I?”
I hesitated.
Then removed the chain and placed it in his palm.
His hand was warm.
Much warmer than his face ever looked.
He examined the edge.
“There’s a seam.”
He pressed his thumbnail into the tiny groove.
The back popped open.
I gasped.
Inside was a thin brass key.
And a strip of paper folded so tightly it was almost invisible.
Dante unfolded it.
A number.
Underneath:
UNION.
“Union Station?” I asked.
“Probably.”
There was a date written beneath it.
The day after Carlo Moretti was murdered.
I stared at the key.
“My mother hid this for eighteen years.”
“Looks that way.”
“Then why give me the locket?”
“Because she expected you to open it eventually.”
“She never told me it opened.”
“Maybe she hoped you never needed to.”
That sounded like Mom too.
I reached for the photograph again.
Something bothered me.
“What?”
Dante followed my gaze.
“My mother is wearing a coat.”
“Yes.”
“Look at the collar.”
A tiny silver pin was visible.
A star.
I knew that pin.
I had packed it after my mother died.
It was still attached to her old navy winter coat.
The coat was in a storage unit near my apartment because I couldn’t bring myself to donate it.
I stood.
“Her coat.”
Dante understood.
“We go tomorrow.”
“No. We go now.”
“You’ve been awake—”
“Dante.”
He stopped.
I held out my hand.
“My mother. My key. My decision.”
For several seconds, he simply looked at me.
Then he took his car keys from the desk.
“Your decision.”
At the storage unit, the navy coat hung exactly where I had left it.
I reached into one pocket.
Nothing.
Then the other.
My fingers touched metal.
I pulled out an old pocket watch.
Dante made a sound behind me.
Not a word.
A breath.
The watch was heavy silver.
An engraved M covered the back.
“Your father’s?”
“No.”
He took it carefully.
“This belonged to Matteo Vitelli.”
I stared.
Marco’s dead brother.
Inside the lid were four handwritten words.
NOT CARLO.
NOT LAURA.
ASK V.S.
Dante went perfectly still.
“Who is V.S.?”
He looked at me.
“The man who raised me after my father died.”
My stomach dropped.
“Victor Salvi?”
“Yes.”
Then I remembered another man.
A gray-haired visitor who used to sit beside my mother’s hospital bed when I went downstairs for coffee.
The man she had once introduced only as an old friend.
A man with a black onyx ring.
“Oh God.”
Dante’s eyes sharpened.
“What?”
May you like
I looked at him.
“Victor Salvi knew my mother.”
