THE MAFIA BOSS TOOK ONE BITE OF MY MOTHER'S RECIPE—AND UNCOVERED THE DEADLY LIE HE BURIED SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO

By three in the morning, the mansion had been transformed into a war room.

A private physician had stitched Matteo's arm and wrapped my bruised wrists. Downstairs in the fortified wine cellar, Luca Ferraro’s screams had finally stopped, replaced by the low murmur of confessions recorded on high-end audio tape.

I sat in Matteo’s private office, wrapped in a fresh wool coat, staring at a cup of black coffee that had gone cold.

Matteo walked in, carrying a folder of surveillance photographs and a satellite phone. He looked older, tired, but the fire in his eyes had hardened into something indestructible.

"He talked," Matteo said, leaning against the edge of the desk.

"Who was behind him?" I asked, my voice steady now. The trembling had stopped hours ago.

"Don Carmine Moretti," Matteo replied. "The patriarch of the family my father wanted me to marry into. Carmine discovered that Luca was running side deals. Instead of exposing him, Carmine used Luca's leverage to plan a coup. They were going to eliminate me, place Luca in charge, and absorb the De Luca shipping empire under the Moretti syndicate."

Matteo looked down at the blue notebook lying on his desk.

"Luca told us one more thing," Matteo continued. "Your mother didn't leave everything in that notebook. There is a second box. A safety deposit key and a recorded cassette tape she hid in our old apartment in Cicero before she moved you north."

"Our old apartment?" I frowned. "That building was abandoned five years ago. It’s an empty brick shell waiting for demolition."

"Which means nobody has touched it," Matteo said. He pulled a heavy automatic pistol from his shoulder holster, checked the chamber with a crisp click, and set it on the desk in front of me. "The Commission has called an emergency summit at the Drake Hotel tonight at eight o'clock. Carmine Moretti thinks Luca succeeded. He thinks Bellavita was the end of the Rossi line and that I am lying in a private morgue."

"You're going to walk into that summit," I realized.

"We are going to walk into that summit," Matteo corrected me. "With the tape. With the ledger. And with the daughter Carmine tried to slaughter in the shadows."

He looked at me, his gaze searching mine with raw honesty.

"You don't have to do this, Elena. I can put you on a private jet to Zurich in two hours. You will have more money than you can spend in three lifetimes. You will never have to look over your shoulder again."

I stared at the gun on the desk.

I thought about my mother, coughing into rags in that freezing Cicero apartment, refusing to buy medicine so she could pay for my school books. I thought about the fear she had carried in her chest for seventeen years, dying alone in a public hospital ward while Carmine Moretti and his soldiers dined on gold plates in downtown Chicago.

"She spent eleven years running," I said, my hand closing around the checkered grip of the pistol. "I'm not running for another minute."

Matteo’s lips curled into a faint, grim smile.