Chapter 7
“How much did you see?”
“Enough.”
“What was inside?”
“A safe.”
His gaze sharpened. “You’re certain.”
“Yes.”
He turned and looked at the wall behind his desk. The paneling was old, dark walnut, fitted in the twenties when the house was built. He had sat in front of it every day for five years.
There was no safe behind that wall. At least, none he knew about.
“What happened next?”
“He opened it.”
“How?”
“A key.”
“What did he take?”
“A red folder.”
“Anything else?”
“I don’t know. I heard footsteps in the corridor and I thought someone else was coming, so I went out the side door.”
“And Bellini saw you.”
“Yes.”
Dante looked down at the cufflink on the desk.
“You think the man was Bellini.”
“I think this was under your desk.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Alessia met his eyes.
“No,” she said. “I don’t know who it was.”
That answer mattered. She could have accused the man who had just tried to have her fired. She could have pointed at Lorenzo Bellini and let the whole weight of the Moretti house fall on him, and no one would have blamed her.
She didn’t.
Dante picked up the cufflink and turned it over in his fingers.
“Why didn’t you tell me immediately?”
Alessia laughed — a soft, tired sound with no humor in it.
“I’m a maid in a mafia boss’s house,” she said, “holding evidence that his financial advisor may have opened a secret safe he doesn’t know exists.”
Dante looked at her.
“When you say it like that.”
“How else would you say it?”
He almost smiled again.
Then Alessia’s expression went serious.
“I was afraid,” she said.
Dante studied her hands. They were trembling slightly, and she had not noticed, and he had.
“You still are?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
She frowned. “Good?”
“People who aren’t afraid in situations like this usually don’t understand them.”
He walked toward the door.
“Stay here.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
He stopped with his hand on the latch.
“One more question.”
“What?”
“The photograph of my mother. Where is it?”
Alessia reached into her other pocket.
She produced it carefully and held it out, and Dante took it, and for a long moment he did not move at all.
Bianca Moretti stood outside the mansion twenty years ago, young, laughing, one hand raised against the sun. Beside her stood a man Alessia did not recognize — dark-haired, serious, in a suit that did not fit him well.