Chapter 2 - THE ROOM BENEATH THE RESTAURANTDominic Moretti’s restaurant had a basement no customer knew existed.
The entrance was hidden behind a wine cabinet in his private office. The silver-haired woman pressed her thumb to a scanner, and the entire cabinet slid sideways without making a sound.
“My name is Sofia,” she told me.
She smiled, but her eyes remained alert.
“What’s down there?” I asked.
“A safe place.”
Dominic stood behind us, speaking into his phone.
“Lock every exit. No one leaves until facial-recognition checks are complete.”
One of his men asked, “Including the police?”
“Especially the police.”
Sofia guided me down a narrow staircase.
The room beneath the restaurant did not look like a mafia dungeon. There were couches, computer screens, a kitchen, several closed doors, and a long table covered with maps.
A woman wearing glasses sat at six monitors.
A young man with a bandage around his hand watched traffic-camera recordings.
Two armed guards stood beside a steel door.
“Is this where you keep prisoners?” I asked.
Sofia glanced at Dominic.
“Sometimes.”
“The man from the car?”
“Not in this room.”
“Are you going to kill him?”
Dominic ended his phone call.
“Not before he tells us where your mother is.”
That answer should have frightened me.
Instead, it made something in my chest loosen.
Nobody had believed me before.
Now the most feared man in the city had locked down an entire restaurant because my mother was missing.
Sofia brought me a glass of water.
My hands shook so badly that water spilled onto the table.
Dominic took the glass, held it steady, and waited for me to drink.
“You said the driver appeared three blocks from your school,” he said. “Was it always the same place?”
“Usually near Parker Street.”
“Usually?”
“Once near the pharmacy. Once beside the church.”
“What time?”
“Three fifteen. Sometimes three twenty.”
“Did he ever follow you in the morning?”
“No.”
“On weekends?”
“No.”
“Did anyone else watch you?”
I thought about it.
“There was a woman.”
Everyone became still.
“What woman?” Sofia asked.
“She sat on a bench near the school. She wore a red scarf.”
“How often?”
“Three times.”
“Did she speak to you?”
“No. She fed pigeons.”
Dominic looked at the woman at the monitors. “Pull footage from every camera around Ridgemont Elementary for the last two weeks. Search for a woman in a red scarf.”
The woman nodded.
Sofia crouched beside me.
“Did you tell the police about her?”
“I only told them about the car.”
“Good.”
“Why is that good?”
“Because if someone inside the department is involved, they may not know you noticed her.”
I stared at the monitors.
One screen showed the restaurant above us. Police officers stood near the entrance, arguing with Dominic’s men.
Another showed the burning sedan.
A third showed the alley behind the building.
“Where is the driver?” I asked again.
Dominic pointed to the steel door.
“Behind there.”
I looked at him.
“Can I talk to him?”
“No.”
“He knows my mother.”
“That makes him more dangerous, not less.”
“He said she changed my last name.”
Dominic pulled out the chair across from me and sat.
“What do you know about your father?”
“My mother said he died before I was born.”
“How?”
“A construction accident.”
“His name?”
I hesitated.
“Elias Hale.”
Dominic’s eyes moved briefly toward Sofia.
She noticed too.
“What?” I asked.
Dominic leaned back.
“Elias Hale was not your father.”
Anger flashed through me.
“You don’t know that.”
“I knew Elias.”
“You knew my father?”
“He worked for me.”
The room seemed to tilt.
“What did he do?”
“He drove my brother.”
I stopped breathing.
Dominic continued carefully.
“Elias Hale died at the Belladonna warehouse on the same night my brother was murdered.”
“But my mother said—”
“She may have been trying to protect you.”
“From what?”
Before he could answer, the woman at the computer raised her voice.
“I found Mara.”
A traffic-camera image appeared on the largest screen.
My mother stood outside our apartment building at 1:52 p.m. She wore blue hospital scrubs and carried her lunch bag.
A white van waited near the curb.
The next image showed her walking toward the bus stop.
The third showed two men stepping from the van.
One wore a utility uniform.
The other wore a baseball cap.
They approached her from behind.
I jumped out of my chair.
“What are they doing?”
The recording moved frame by frame.
The man in the uniform held something against my mother’s side.
She stiffened.
Then they guided her into the van.
“She didn’t fight,” I whispered.
“They had a weapon,” Dominic said.
The van pulled away.
“Can you follow it?” Sofia asked.
The computer operator switched cameras.
The van appeared at the next intersection.
Then another.
It crossed the bridge toward the industrial district.
At 2:17 p.m., it entered an underground parking garage beneath the municipal courthouse.
The room went silent.
“The courthouse?” Sofia said.
The operator shook her head.
“Here’s the problem. The van never came out.”
Dominic stood.
“Check service exits.”
“I did. Nothing.”
“License plate?”
“Registered to the city’s Department of Public Safety.”
Sofia looked at him. “Police vehicle.”
Dominic’s jaw tightened.
I moved closer to the screen.
The image showed my mother looking back just before she entered the van.
Her face was terrified.
But she was not looking at the men.
She was looking directly at the traffic camera.
Her right hand was pressed against her chest.
“What is she doing?” I asked.
The operator enlarged the picture.
My mother’s fingers formed a shape.
Three fingers extended.
Two folded.
Sofia frowned.
“Is that a signal?”
“It’s something she taught me,” I said.
Every face turned toward me.
“What does it mean?” Dominic asked.
I touched three fingers to my chest the same way.
“When I was little, we had a game. If we got separated in a store, she would show three fingers and I had to remember three places.”
“What places?”
“Home. School. Church.”
Dominic looked at the map.
“Which church?”
“St. Agnes.”
The computer operator searched quickly.
Sofia said, “St. Agnes is six blocks from the courthouse.”
Dominic pointed at the image.
“Your mother wanted you to think of those places. Is there anything connecting them?”
I shook my head.
Then I remembered.
“There are boxes.”
“What boxes?”
“My mother keeps one box hidden in each place.”
Dominic’s eyes narrowed.
“What is inside them?”
“I don’t know. She told me they were for emergencies.”
“Where is the one at home?”
“Under the loose floorboard beneath her bed.”
“School?”
“In the old auditorium costume room.”
“Church?”
“Behind a statue of Saint Michael.”
Sofia stared at Dominic.
“Mara prepared dead drops.”
Dominic looked toward the steel door.
“She knew this day could come.”
He ordered three teams to retrieve the boxes.
Then he walked to the steel door.
I followed him.
He stopped.
“I told you to stay with Sofia.”
“The driver knew my mother prepared those boxes, didn’t he?”
“We are about to find out.”
“I want to hear.”
“No.”
“She is my mother.”
“And you are seven.”
“She was taken because of me!”
Dominic turned so suddenly that I stepped back.
“She was not taken because of you.”
His voice filled the room.
“She was taken because adults made choices before you were old enough to understand them. None of this is your fault.”
My eyes burned.
“Then why did they follow me?”
“Because cowards choose the smallest person when they cannot control the strongest.”
The steel door opened.
Two men dragged the sedan driver into the room.
His lip was split from Dominic’s punch. One eye was swelling shut.
He looked at me.
“I told you she lied.”
Dominic seized him by the throat and pushed him into a chair.
“You will answer questions.”
The driver laughed weakly.
“Or what?”
Dominic placed both hands on the chair arms.
“Or I will discover how long a man can regret a single sentence.”
The driver’s smile vanished.
“Where is Mara?” Dominic asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Who took her?”
“I don’t know.”
Dominic looked at Sofia.
She set a photograph on the table.
It showed the driver beside the gray sedan two days earlier.
Another photograph showed him meeting a uniformed police officer behind a convenience store.
The officer was the same man who had entered the restaurant.
The driver looked away.
Dominic asked, “Why did Officer Bell give you Leora’s school schedule?”
“He didn’t.”
Sofia placed a bank record beside the photographs.
“Twenty-five thousand dollars was deposited into your account the next morning.”
The driver swallowed.
Dominic leaned closer.
“The next lie costs you something.”
The driver looked at me.
“My name is Warren Pike.”
“I didn’t ask your name,” Dominic said.
“I’m trying to tell the girl something.”
“You speak to me.”
Warren’s shoulders dropped.
“I was hired to watch her.”
“By whom?”
“A lawyer named Celia Voss.”
Sofia frowned. “The prosecutor?”
Warren nodded.
Dominic went still.
Celia Voss was a name even I recognized. Her face appeared on television whenever the city announced arrests involving organized crime. She spoke about justice while cameras flashed around her.
“What does she want with Leora?” Dominic asked.
“She thinks the girl remembers something.”
“I was a baby when Elias died,” I said.
Warren shook his head.
“Not Elias.”
Dominic’s voice sharpened. “Who?”
Warren stared at the floor.
“The man the girl saw murdered last winter.”
My heart began pounding.
“I didn’t see anyone murdered.”
“Yes, you did.”
“No.”
“You were in the alley behind the Marigold Market on December eighteenth.”
I remembered that night.
My mother had sent me to buy milk.
Snow had started falling.
A police car had blocked the alley, and an officer told me to go around.
“I only saw a police officer.”
Warren lifted his eyes.
“You saw what he put in the trunk.”
A picture flashed inside my mind.
A dark blanket.
A hand hanging beneath it.
A ring on one finger.
I had convinced myself it was a mannequin.
My breathing became shallow.
Dominic noticed.
“What did you see?”
“I don’t know.”
Warren leaned forward.
“A body.”
“Stop,” Dominic warned.
“The murdered man was a federal investigator,” Warren said. “He had spent four years gathering evidence against the Black Council.”
Sofia’s face hardened. “Agent Nathan Cole.”
Warren nodded.
Dominic stared at me.
“Leora, did you tell anyone what you saw?”
“I told my mother there was a man sleeping under a blanket.”
“And what did she do?”
“She locked the doors.”
“Anything else?”
“She asked what his hand looked like.”
Warren laughed bitterly.
“Mara knew exactly who he was.”
Dominic turned back to him.
“Why?”
“Because Mara had been working with him.”
The room became unbearably quiet.
“My mother is a nurse,” I said.
Warren looked at me with something close to pity.
“No, little girl.”
Dominic grabbed his jaw.
“Be careful.”
Warren spoke anyway.
“Your mother was a financial analyst for the Moretti organization.”
I looked at Dominic.
He did not deny it.
“She disappeared after the Belladonna murders,” Warren continued. “She took records belonging to the Black Council. Names. Payments. Judges. Police officers. Politicians.”
Sofia whispered, “The ledger.”
Dominic’s face became stone.
“What ledger?” I asked.
No one answered.
Warren did.
“The list of every powerful person in this city who sold their loyalty.”
He looked toward the monitors.
“Your mother hid it seven years ago.”
I understood then.
The boxes.
The signals.
The lies.
My mother had not been exhausted only because she worked long hospital shifts.
She had been waiting.
Preparing.
Running without moving.
One of Dominic’s men rushed down the staircase carrying a small metal box.
“We found the package at St. Agnes.”
He placed it on the table.
The box had no lock.
Dominic opened it.
Inside was a photograph, a key, and a sealed envelope.
The photograph showed my mother standing beside Elias Hale.
A younger Dominic stood behind them.
And in my mother’s arms was a newborn baby.
Me.
On the back of the photograph, someone had written:
Her real name is Leora Moretti.
I looked up slowly.
Dominic’s face had lost all color.
Sofia covered her mouth.
Warren Pike began to laugh.
Dominic lifted the photograph with trembling fingers.
“No,” he said.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
He looked at the baby in my mother’s arms.
Then at me.
The truth appeared in his eyes before he spoke.
“Elias Hale wasn’t your father.”
My heartbeat filled my ears.
“Then who was?”
May you like
Dominic could barely form the words.
“My brother.”
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