Chapter 2
She did not sleep that night.
She sat on the floor of the bakery kitchen with her back against the oven, the vial in her open palm, and watched the dark-blue sky over Boston turn to gray. At three in the morning she tried Marco’s phone again. Straight to voicemail. She left a message she knew he would never hear: I love you. We’re going to be fine. I don’t know how yet, but we’re going to be fine. Her voice was steady. That surprised her. Some part of her had been trained, maybe by her father, to lie beautifully when it mattered.
By five she had made her decision. She just didn’t tell it to herself out loud.
She packed her knives and her offset spatulas, her piping bags and her jars of Sicilian almond flour — the good flour, the expensive flour, the kind her father had driven forty miles to buy. She filled her thermos with strong coffee and slid the vial into a false compartment sewn into the padded sleeve, the one she used for cash on market days. Then she stood at the sink and picked up her phone and looked at the little green call button for a long, long time.
Nine-one-one. It would have been so easy. One call, and the nightmare would belong to someone else.
But Ferrara had told her, almost kindly, that Dante Romano owned every judge and every badge in the city, and she believed him. She had seen how fast the men had found Marco. How fast they had come through her door. There was no cavalry in Boston. There was only the rain, and the pistol, and the brother she had raised since their parents died.
She put the phone down.
By the time the sun rose over the North End, Emilia Santoro was standing in a queue of catering vans at the gates of the Romano estate in Weston, and the morning had turned the color of tin. The iron gates were taller than her old apartment. Men in black earpieces moved through the rain with scanners and clipboards, pulling open crates of produce, x-raying flour bags, patting down caterers with hands that found everything.
She’d hidden the vial well. She knew she had. But her heart still tried to crawl out through her throat when a guard ran a scanner over her thermos, the green light came on, and he waved her through.
“Kitchen’s down the corridor,” the guard said, handing back her ID with barely a glance. “Past the double doors. Don’t wander.”
The Romano kitchen was a cathedral of steel — copper pots hanging like church bells, a dozen cooks moving in choreographed panic, heat rolling off the ovens in waves that hit her like a wall. The head chef, a lean Frenchman named Fournier, took one look at her and dismissed her with a flick of his hand.
“Pastry station, rear corner. Three hours until service. Stay out of my way and ruin nothing.”
Emilia found her corner and unpacked. It was a relief, the work. The feel of a whisk in her hand, the weight of a bag of flour, the familiar arithmetic of butter and eggs and sugar — these were things that obeyed her. For a few hours, she could pretend she was just a baker who had been asked to make the best cake of her life.
The torte came together the way it always did, the way her father had taught her with his big flour-dusted hands over hers. Three tiers of golden sponge, cloud-light, layered with mascarpone and crushed pistachios, crowned with sugar flowers she shaped while her eyes burned with exhaustion. The smell of toasted almonds filled the corner and made her ache with a grief she couldn’t name.
And then, at twenty past six, the kitchen went silent.
The shouting stopped. The pots stopped striking the counters. Even the hiss of the steamers seemed to soften, as though the room itself were holding its breath. Emilia looked up from the mascarpone she was whipping, the whisk frozen in mid-air.
A man had come down the stairs.
He wasn’t what the movies promised. No chains, no snarl, no menacing entourage. He wore a midnight-navy tuxedo that looked poured over him, his dark hair silvered at the temples, and he moved through the room with the gravity of a planet, drawing every eye without once demanding attention. He stopped at the foot of the stairs, hands in his pockets, and surveyed the kitchen with calm amber eyes.
“Do not stop because of me,” he said, and his voice was low and warm and carried to the far corner like it had been built for ballrooms. “The politicians upstairs are giving me a headache. I came down to hide.”
Nobody moved. Nobody breathed.
Then he turned his head, and those amber eyes found Emilia.
They found her the way a searchlight finds a ship in fog — unhurried, certain, impossible to escape. He began to walk toward her station.
May you like
The whisk was still in her hand. Her fingers had gone cold.
This was the man. The one whose death she was carrying in her sleeve, tucked against her thermos, wrapped in the smell of coffee. Dante Romano. The most dangerous man on the East Coast. And he was walking toward her as if he had been looking for her his whole life.
