Chapter 4
The grand dining room of the Romano estate was a cathedral built for the worship of money.
Crystal chandeliers drowned the tables in warm gold. Men in midnight suits and women in silk moved between clusters of laughter, and Emilia recognized faces she had only ever seen on the news and in the society pages — a state senator with his arm around a shipping magnate, a superior court judge swirling red wine and nodding at whatever the man beside him murmured.
It wasn’t a birthday party. It was a map of Boston’s power, and at its center, at the head table between two bodyguards the size of refrigerators, sat Dante Romano.
Emilia pressed herself to the wall beside the kitchen doors and watched the server carry the torte across the room. Nobody noticed. Cakes arrived at galas all the time. Only one man in the entire estate knew what that platter carried, and she had just bet his life on the hope that he would understand.
Dante raised his fork.
And paused.
She saw it happen in perfect, terrible slow motion — his amber eyes catching the corner of parchment peeking out beneath the doily, two fingers turning the plate a fraction of an inch, his jaw tightening almost imperceptibly as he read the words she had written in edible ink.
For a long second, nothing moved.
Then Dante’s gaze lifted — not toward the room, not toward his guards, but straight at the kitchen doors, straight through the glass, into her eyes. Across sixty feet of candlelight and crystal, he held her gaze, and something passed between them that had no name.
He nodded. Once. Barely visible.
Then he loaded the fork with a perfect triangle of torte, put it in his mouth, chewed slowly, closed his eyes in what looked like rapture, and swallowed.
“Magnificent,” he announced, loud enough to carry over the string quartet. “My compliments to the baker.”
Emilia stopped breathing.
Ten seconds passed. Twenty. He reached for his espresso, took a sip, set it down. And then, without warning, he dropped his fork.
It clattered against the china, and the room turned. His hand flew to his chest. His face contorted into a mask of sudden, awful agony. He rose, knocking his chair over, staggered, clutched at his throat, and fell across the table — scattering glass and flowers and screaming guests — before hitting the marble floor and beginning to convulse.
Women screamed. Men shouted. Somewhere a chair went over, and the room dissolved into pandemonium, and Emilia, watching from behind the glass, had the mad, dizzying thought that Dante Romano was the finest actor she had ever seen.
“Everyone stay where you are!”
A tall man in a gray suit cut through the chaos, drawing a pistol as he moved. Silas Vance, the head of security, the man who had walked Dante out of the kitchen three hours earlier. He walked straight past the panic, straight up to the convulsing body of his employer, and raised his weapon.
“Stand down,” Silas shouted at the guards closing in. “He’s gone. Romano is dead. Ferrara sends his regards — the regime changes tonight.”
Six men moved out of the crowd to flank him, weapons drawn, and the room went very, very quiet.
It had never been about the cake at all, Emilia understood dimly. Ferrara had bought his victory in two places — the kitchen, and the head of security. The poison had been the alibi. The bullets were the plan.
Silas crouched over the still-twitching body and lowered his pistol toward Dante’s temple. “Nothing personal, Dom.”
Dante’s eyes opened.
He moved like a striking animal, faster than any man that age had any right to move, and before Silas understood what was happening, a SIG Sauer was in Dante’s hand and he had fired twice. The first round took Silas in the chest. The second took him in the throat. The head of security folded forward with a look of almost comical surprise, and died before he finished falling.
“Kill them!” Dante roared, rolling behind an overturned table as the room erupted.
Gunfire. Glass. The chandeliers swung as bullets chewed through the air, and the grand dining room of the Romano estate became a war zone in three seconds. Emilia was still at the kitchen doors, mouth open, when the glass beside her exploded and she screamed and hit the floor.
Strong hands seized the collar of her chef’s coat and hauled her upright.
It was Dante. His tuxedo was torn, blood smeared his sleeve, and a wild, electric light burned in his eyes. He shoved her through a steel door marked STAFF ONLY and slammed it behind them as rounds tore through the wall beside his head.
“Move.” He pushed her down a narrow concrete corridor while the gunfire chased them like a hound.
A keypad. A code she couldn’t see. A section of wall that slid open onto a room of monitors and weapon racks — a panic room, armored and silent and impossibly cold.
Dante pushed her inside and sealed the door, and the world went suddenly, violently quiet.
Emilia slid down the steel wall and sat on the floor, knees to her chest, and cried without sound, shaking apart while above them, somewhere far away, men died for the choice she had made.
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The radio on the console hissed.
“Actual, this is Echo One. We’ve swept the estate.” A pause. “Ferrara isn’t here. He never came.”
