Chapter 6
The next morning Dante came down to breakfast earlier than usual.
He had slept perhaps three hours. The private library had kept him until almost four. He had gone over Anna’s pages twice more, searching for the shape of what she had omitted, and he had not found it — which only confirmed that she had hidden it well.
The breakfast room faced the east garden. Sunlight came through the tall windows in long pale columns. The housekeeper had set a single place at the long table, as she did every morning. Coffee, a small jug of cream, one soft-boiled egg, a folded newspaper.
Dante sat. He did not open the paper.
He had been there perhaps four minutes when Sophie appeared in the doorway.
She was wearing a different nightgown today, white, with a small embroidered flower at the collar. Her hair had not been brushed. The cloth doll with the missing button eye hung from one hand by a floppy arm.
She stopped when she saw him. Her eyes went wide.
Then, with the complete lack of hesitation that only a five-year-old could manage, she walked across the room to his chair, planted both small hands on his knee, and climbed up into his lap.
Dante froze.
He had held exactly one child in his adult life. His cousin’s son at a baptism, for forty seconds, under the terrified supervision of the boy’s mother. He had given the baby back as quickly as etiquette allowed.
Sophie settled against his chest as if she had done it a hundred times. She arranged the doll carefully across her own knees.
Then she tilted her head back and looked up at him with the full gravity of a very small person asking a very large question.
“Why don’t you ever smile, mister?”
Dante opened his mouth.
He closed it.
Footsteps hurried down the hallway. Anna appeared in the doorway, saw her daughter on Dante’s lap, and the color left her face.
“Sophie. Come here right now.”
Sophie did not move. She was still looking up at Dante.
“Mr. Moretti, I am so sorry. She slipped away from me. She knows she is not allowed in this part of the house. I —”
“Mrs. Carter.”
Anna stopped.
“It is all right.”
Anna did not move from the doorway. Her hand gripped the frame.
Dante looked down at the child in his lap. Sophie had not blinked. She was waiting with the patience of someone who believed questions deserved answers.
“What is your doll’s name?” he asked.
Sophie held it up.
“Her name is Penny. She lost her eye a very long time ago. I don’t know where it is, but she can still see out of the other one.”
“That is lucky.”
“Mama says one eye is enough if you know what to look at.”
Dante felt something shift behind his ribs.
It was a small movement — no larger than the ice shifting in the whiskey glass had been three nights earlier — but it was there.
He had a sister once.
Her name had been Elena. She had been six when the fever took her, and he had been eight, and he had held her small hand in a hospital room with pale green walls, and he had promised her that he would not let her be afraid.
He had kept that promise.
He had kept very few since.
Sophie was still waiting.
Dante looked at her serious face, at Penny with her one remaining button eye, and he smiled.
It was a small smile. Barely a movement at the corner of his mouth.
But Anna, from the doorway, saw it, and her hand loosened on the frame.
Marco Bellini saw the smile from the hallway.
He had come to the breakfast room to deliver an update on the warehouse rotations. He had stopped three steps before the doorway when he heard the child’s voice, and he had stayed there, out of sight, listening.
He had been Dante’s second for sixteen years. He had seen Dante bury his father. He had seen Dante bury two cousins. He had seen Dante close three contracts worth more than most men would earn in a lifetime.
He had never in all those years seen Dante Moretti smile at anything that was not useful.
Marco turned around and walked back the way he had come.
In the side office on the first floor, he closed the door and locked it. He sat down at the desk he rarely used. He opened a drawer, took out a phone that was not his usual phone, and placed a call.
“I need a check.”
The voice on the other end was quiet and professional.
“Name: Anna Carter. White, mid-thirties. Child, female, five years old, named Sophie. Hired through a cleaning agency in Brooklyn six months ago. References from a family in Worcester. Priority: highest. I want it on my desk by tonight.”
He ended the call.
He sat for a moment with his hand still on the phone.
Then he opened a different drawer and took out his personal phone. He scrolled through his photographs until he found the one he had taken two days ago, from across the study. A wide shot of Anna seated at the keyboard, her face in three-quarter profile under the lamp.
He cropped it tightly. He compressed it. He attached it to an encrypted message and sent it to a number he had used only four times in two years.
The number belonged to the head of security at Helix Nova.
The message read: Identify. Urgent.
May you like
Marco put the phone face down on the desk.
He stood. He walked to the small bar cart in the corner, poured himself two fingers of bourbon, and drank it in one swallow.
