Chapter 3
“You’re Emilia,” Dante Romano said, and it wasn’t a question. He stopped across the marble counter, hands still in his pockets, and looked at her the way a man looks at a photograph he has almost forgotten he loves.
She couldn’t find her voice. She nodded.
“I’ve seen your picture in the window of the shop on Hanover,” he said, and there was something careful in his voice, something almost fragile. “I used to go there as a boy. Every Saturday, after my father finished at the docks, he’d drag me by the wrist through the North End, and the last stop was always your father’s bakery.”
Emilia’s breath caught. “You knew my father?”
“Tommaso Santoro.” Dante said the name like a prayer. “He used to slip me a cannoli when my father wasn’t looking. Said I was too thin for an Italian boy.” A shadow moved across his face, there and gone. “My father was not a soft man. Your father’s shop was the only place I ever felt safe. The only place I ever felt like a child.”
The kitchen around them had resumed its quiet work, cooks keeping their eyes down, but Emilia felt as though the two of them were standing on an island, the heat from the ovens lapping at her like tide.
“When I heard you’d taken over the shop, I sent someone to order your torte. Three months ago. Under a false name.” He smiled, a small and tired thing. “It tasted exactly like my childhood.”
He reached across the counter and dipped one finger into the bowl of unpoisoned mascarpone, then brought it to his lips. His eyes closed for a moment. “Perfect,” he said. “Not too sweet. Your father would be proud.”
Emilia’s heart was a stone in her chest. This man — this soft-voiced, amber-eyed man who remembered her father’s kindness across a gap of thirty years — this was the rabid animal Aldo Ferrara had described. The disease. The plague to be ended.
She looked at his face, and she knew, with a sickening, cold clarity, that Ferrara had lied. Not about what Dante Romano was — the man was a criminal, and she had no doubt his hands had done terrible things. But about what he meant. About why this was being asked of her.
Because if Dante died tonight, Aldo Ferrara would inherit Boston. The docks would run red. And the first thing the new king would do, the very first thing, would be to bury the witnesses — the little baker and her brother who knew too much. Dead men don’t identify anyone.
The hundred thousand dollars and the tickets to Europe had always been a lie. The duffel bag would hold two body bags.
“Is something wrong?”
Dante had noticed. Of course he had noticed. He stepped closer, and his brow furrowed with what looked like genuine concern — the real thing, the kind you can’t fake, the kind that made her want to cry. “You’ve gone pale. Is it the heat?”
“I’m fine.” Emilia stepped back, one hand pressed flat against her apron, against the hard little outline of the vial. “It’s just the ovens. I’m not used to— the ovens.”
He studied her for a long moment, and his eyes were so perceptive they felt like surgery. She had the awful sense that he could see through her skin, down into the crime she was carrying, the death she was supposed to serve him on a silver platter.
“Rest if you need to,” he said gently. “No cake in the world is worth collapsing over.”
He gave her a single nod — respectful, final — and turned and walked out of the kitchen, his guards materializing from the shadows to follow him like a second skin.
Emilia stood alone at her station with the heat of the ovens against her back and the poison in her sleeve, and watched him go.
The next three hours vanished like smoke. The torte was finished — three flawless tiers, gold and cream and crushed green pistachio, crowned with sugar flowers. Only one thing remained: the amaretto drizzle, a river of amber syrup in a silver pitcher, meant to be poured over each slice at the moment of service, keeping the sponge moist, carrying the flavor, the final signature of her father’s recipe.
The maître d’ appeared at the door, checking his watch.
“Dessert service in five minutes. Is the torte ready? Mr. Romano wants his portion at the head table, immediately.”
Emilia looked at the pitcher. Then at the vial in her hand. Then at the last photograph of her father, slipped into her apron that morning when she thought she might need a reason.
She remembered Dante Romano’s tired smile. She remembered her brother’s sob, the sound of a boy who believed he was already dead. And she remembered the flat, patient eyes of Aldo Ferrara — a man who did not want her cake, who did not want her money, who wanted her silence and her disappearance, in that order.
If Dante died, they died. Every part of her knew it.
But if Dante lived — if she could save him and make him believe — then maybe, just maybe, there was a world where her brother walked out of that basement office alive.
She uncorked the vial.
The smell that rose from it was strange — bitter almonds and something electric, like the air after lightning. She held it over the drain of the industrial sink, turned the water to scalding, and let the poison slip out of her hand and away into the dark of the city’s pipes.
Then she tore a square of parchment from her bag, took the edible-ink pen she used for sugar flowers, and wrote in a hand so steady it amazed her:
Cake is safe. I poured it away. Ferrara holds my brother — if you live, he kills us both. Fake your death. Please.
She folded the note until it was no bigger than her thumb, slipped it beneath the gold doily on the serving platter, and placed the perfect slice of torte directly on top of it — innocent, sweet, and entirely unpoisoned.
“Is it ready?” the maître d’ demanded, sweeping back in.
“Yes.” Emilia wiped her hands on her apron. “It’s perfect.”
May you like
The platter was carried away, carried down the long corridor toward the grand dining room, toward the man who remembered her father, toward the gun against her brother’s head, toward the one impossible gamble she had left.
And Emilia followed, on legs made of glass, to watch God roll the dice.
