Chapter 2
From the road, the Moretti estate looked like a piece of Italy that had drifted across the Atlantic and washed ashore in Oyster Bay. Four stories of pale stone. Arched windows. A garden as long as a runway. Two guards at the iron gate on Bayville Avenue, black coats, hands never quite in their pockets.
It was the kind of house people slowed down to look at, then quickly looked away from.
Inside the second-floor study, Dante finished his espresso and did not pick the file back up. Thirty-eight years old, seven of them in his father’s chair. He had inherited the family the same night his father inherited a bullet at a red-checkered table on Mulberry Street. Five families now called him boss. He had never married. He slept in a house with six bedrooms and used only one.
He found himself listening for small feet in the corridor.
Nothing. Only rain, and the absence of Bruno, which was its own kind of sound.
Two floors below, in the cellar, Elena Vasquez crouched under a single yellow bulb, restacking cases of Barolo the day boys had stacked wrong. By vintage, by weight, the way Senora Moretti had taught her. Her hands were red from rinse water. Her back ached in a line from hip to shoulder blade.
Thirty-four. Widow. Mother. Cuban by birth, Brooklyn by grief.
She glanced at the clock nailed above the rack. Almost eleven. She thought of Sophie across the garden in the staff cottage, and of the star pillow Miguel had bought at a Coney Island stall the summer before he died.
*One more hour,* she promised herself. *Then I go to her.*
But the anniversary dinner, sixty-five years of the Moretti name, forty bosses arriving from up and down the coast, was three nights away. In this house, in these nights, no woman with a mop was permitted to be tired.
Footsteps came down the cellar stairs. Slow. Unhurried.
She did not need to look up.
Vincenzo Moretti passed her with a bottle of Amarone held by the neck. Sixty-one. Silver hair, silver watch, the same fine wool coat winter after winter. His brother had died at that red-checkered table. He was the only man in the house Dante called family rather than associate.
He did not glance at Elena. He never did. He shouldered the back door open, and the smell of wet grass rolled in. Then the door closed and he was gone into the garden.
Elena noted it the way she noted everything, out of habit. *Vincenzo. Out to the yard. Eleven o’clock. Alone.*
She went back to the Barolo.
Across the garden, Sophie let herself into the staff cottage on tiptoe. She skipped her own small bed by the window and climbed into her mother’s, into the dip that smelled of jasmine soap and old cotton.
Bruno stood at the foot of the bed, considering. Then he sprang up in one soft motion and settled across her legs, his heavy head on her stomach.
Sophie put her mouth to his ear.
“If you hear the knocks,” she whispered, “you’ll bark. Right?”
Bruno made one low sound in his throat. Not a word. An answer.
Outside the cottage window, between two rows of black pines, a shape moved along the gravel path. Not a gate guard. Not one of the housemen. A man in a long coat, hood up, walking exactly where the security cameras did not reach.
He passed the cottage without knocking.
No one saw him.
At 12:40 that night, Elena crossed the wet lawn with feet gone to dull wood. Her hair smelled of candle wax and lemon polish. She let herself in with the key she wore on a leather cord, turned the lock behind her, and hung her apron on its hook.
Then she stopped in the middle of the dark room and forgot to breathe.
On her bed, under the wool blanket her mother had sent from Havana the year Sophie was born, her daughter slept curled against the neck of an animal the size of a young lion.
She knew the dog by name. By the black shape of him near the study fire, a shape she had walked past a thousand times without once seeing it move. She had never seen him leave that room.
Elena stood at the foot of the bed for a long time. Her hand rose slowly to her mouth.
Sophie’s eyes opened halfway.
May you like
“Mama. Mr. Dante lent me his dog,” she murmured. “He said yes.”
Every nerve in Elena’s body went cold.
