Chapter 5 - The Poisoner's Reveal
"You always were too sentimental, Matteo," Luca said, stepping into the room with measured, deliberate strides.
He didn't look frantic. He didn't look panicked. He had the calm, detached expression of a surgeon who had just made an incision he had planned for two decades.
Two more armed men moved into the room behind him, taking positions flanking the entrance and covering every angle.
Matteo didn't reach for a weapon. He didn't even flinch. He slowly moved his body sideways, placing himself directly between Luca's gun barrel and where I stood behind the massive desk.
"You took the fork from the vault," Matteo said, his voice dropping into a register of terrifying stillness.
"Of course I did," Luca sneered, a cold, mocking smile playing at the corners of his lips. "It was poetic, don't you think? Seventeen years ago, Isabella ruined my first attempt to put you in the ground. She took that fork and hid it. She kept it as her little insurance policy. When I finally tracked down where she had died, I searched that miserable apartment in Cicero, but the old witch had already moved the girl."
"How did you find her, Luca?" Matteo asked. "She was working in a restaurant for two years under her mother's name. Why tonight?"
"Because you were getting reckless, boss," Luca said, raising the pistol slightly. "You started talking about retiring. You started meeting with the Commission about restructuring the shipping routes. Giving away twenty percent of our logistics to the legitimate unions. You were going soft in your old age."
Luca glanced at me, his eyes dead and predatory.
"And then, three weeks ago, my people intercepted a medical record from Northwestern Memorial," Luca continued. "A twenty-five-year-old girl named Elena Rossi visited the clinic for a routine blood test. Her DNA profile pinged a federal registry alert because seventeen years ago, Isabella filed that secret paternity suit."
My breath caught in my throat. The routine blood test for my restaurant health card—the simple, bureaucratic requirement I had filled out to keep my minimum-wage job.
"I realized Isabella hadn't destroyed the evidence," Luca said. "She had passed it down. I knew the girl had the notebook. And I knew that if you ever saw her face, you would know."
"So you orchestrated the kitchen at Bellavita," I said, stepping out from behind Matteo's shoulder despite his arm shooting out to hold me back. "You burned the sous-chef. You sent back the plate at Table Twelve."
"Smart girl," Luca smirked. "Just like your mother. You couldn't resist fixing the sauce. You couldn't resist using that pathetic little fennel trick she taught you. If you had just stayed in the kitchen and kept your mouth shut, my men would have pulled Matteo out of the restaurant in a body bag, and you would have been arrested by CPD within two hours. But you had to step forward. You had to be the hero."
"She is my daughter, Luca," Matteo said, his voice vibrating with suppressed fury. "You cross this line, and there is no hole on this earth deep enough to hide you from the Commission."
Luca laughed—a sharp, barking sound that echoed off the high ceiling.
"The Commission?" Luca shook his head. "Matteo, look outside the window. Who do you think authorized this? Don Salvatore's old allies never wanted you running this city. They tolerated you because of your father's bloodline. But they don't want a reformed boss who cries over dead cooks and secret daughters. They want an enforcer who keeps the cash flowing."
Luca raised the gun, his finger tightening on the trigger.
"Say goodbye to your legacy, Matteo."
In that fraction of a second, the heavy antique brass clock on the mantle chimed the top of the hour.
A deafening crack shattered the silence, but it didn't come from Luca's pistol.
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The heavy plate-glass window behind us exploded inward in a shower of crystallized diamonds. A high-caliber sniper round tore through the library, striking the gunman to Luca’s left directly in the chest, hurling him backward through the doorway in a spray of scarlet.
***
