Chapter 3
She placed it in Mrs. Conte’s palm.
“Fine,” she said.
She turned toward the suitcase.
“Stop.”
The word crossed the foyer without volume and stopped her where she stood.
Alessia closed her eyes for half a second. Then she turned around.
Dante Moretti had come down the final stair. He was tall — six feet and a little more — in a charcoal suit with no tie, and his face held the particular calm of a man who had spent years learning that anger was more useful when nobody could see it.
He walked past Mrs. Conte.
He walked past Alessia, close enough that she caught the faint smell of cedar and cold air, and he stopped beside the suitcase.
He looked at it.
Then he looked up at the staff.
“Who packed this?”
Nobody answered.
Dante waited. He was very good at waiting. Alessia had watched him wait out a contractor once for eleven minutes in the kitchen doorway, and the man had confessed to padding the invoice before either of them said a word.
Mrs. Conte stepped forward.
“I instructed Maria to prepare Miss Romano’s belongings.”
“When?”
“This morning.”
“What time?”
Mrs. Conte hesitated. It was a small hesitation, but it was there, and Alessia saw Dante see it.
“Approximately six-thirty.”
Dante looked at Alessia. “When were you told you were fired?”
“About two minutes ago.”
He turned back to Mrs. Conte.
“So her belongings were packed before she was questioned.”
Mrs. Conte swallowed. “The evidence was clear.”
“What evidence?”
“She was found in your private study.”
“By whom?”
The question landed like a stone in still water.
Mrs. Conte said nothing.
“By whom, Mrs. Conte?”
A man near the fireplace straightened.
Alessia had noticed him the moment she came down — a man in his fifties with silver hair and an expensive watch, standing with the ease of someone who had never once been asked to wait in a hallway. He was not household staff. Everyone in the house knew who he was. Lorenzo Bellini had been Dante Moretti’s financial advisor for twelve years, and in twelve years he had managed accounts that most men in Chicago would never know existed.
He stepped forward.
“I saw her leaving your study at eleven-forty last night.”
Dante looked at Alessia. “Were you?”
“Yes.”
Mrs. Conte exhaled, as if that settled everything.
Dante did not move. “What were you doing inside?”