Chapter 3 - The Threat
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Luca became very, very still.
Charles Harland had managed the household staff of the Ferraro estate for eight years. He was efficient. He was discreet. And he was apparently foolish enough to frighten a sick, desperate woman into believing she could be callously dismissed without Luca’s direct knowledge.
Nora lifted the soapy, dripping shirt a little higher, her eyes searching his face for any sign of mercy.
“I did good?”
The blue ink stain had spread into a massive, pale blue cloud that ruined the entire lower half of the sleeve. The expensive cotton cuff was wrinkled and frayed from the harsh bristles. One mother-of-pearl button was missing entirely, snapped off in her frantic scrubbing.
Luca looked down at the child’s red, stinging fingers.
A memory struck him so sharply that for a dizzying second, he could not see the laundry room at all.
He was seven years old again, sitting at a wobbly kitchen table in his mother’s narrow, freezing Brooklyn apartment. His cheap school shirt had been stained with purple grape juice. His mother had just worked an agonizing fourteen-hour overnight shift at a local bakery. She had returned home exhausted, her feet swollen, and still stood at the rusted sink scrubbing his collar for an hour because Luca had cried that the other boys at school would laugh at him.
She had sung softly while she worked. An old, beautiful Italian song about a sailor finding his way home by following a single, flickering light in the window.
His mother had been dead for twenty-six years.
Luca had not allowed himself to think about her hands, or her voice, for a very long time. The mafia did not allow room for ghosts.
Nora was watching him, her anxiety mounting.
“Mr. Luca?”
He slowly lowered himself onto one knee. The soapy water on the floor instantly soaked into his tailored trousers, ruining the wool, but he did not care.
He reached out, took her small, wet hands, and turned them gently beneath the harsh fluorescent light.
“You should not be working,” he said softly.
Her lower lip trembled violently. “I can do better. Please.”
“No.”
May you like
A single tear slid down her round cheek.
Luca felt something massive and heavy inside him give way. It did not break. Breaking suggested violence, and he was surrounded by enough violence. This was quieter. It was the sound of a locked, rusted door finally opening in an abandoned, darkened part of his heart.
