🥧 The Apple Pie That Exposed the Mafia Boss’s Cruel Fiancée

Chapter 06 - Emma Reed Is Not Just the Maid

I forgot how to breathe.

For a second, I heard nothing except the dull rush of blood in my ears and the distant, ridiculous sound of a champagne flute tipping over somewhere at the table.

Because she is not just your maid.

The words had come from Enzo Bellini, but everyone looked at me as if the answer might be written across my uniform.

Luca’s voice lowered. “Explain.”

Enzo stood slowly.

Carla turned toward him with quiet fury. “Sit down.”

He did not.

That was the first brave thing I had seen him do all night.

“I have spent twenty-six years sitting down,” he said.

Carla’s expression did not change, but her eyes did.

Enzo looked at me.

“I knew your father.”

“My father?”

“Thomas Reed.”

Hearing his full name in that ballroom felt wrong. My father belonged to hospital rooms and the smell of menthol ointment, to grocery lists written with a shaking hand, to old Cubs games on low volume.

Not to Luca Moretti’s engagement dinner.

“He drove for the Morettis,” Enzo said. “Before he married your mother.”

I shook my head. “My father was a mechanic.”

“He became one.”

Luca looked at me. “You didn’t know?”

“No.”

My voice sounded smaller than I wanted it to.

Vanessa’s laugh came out brittle. “This is what we are doing now? Turning the maid into a hidden heiress?”

“Be quiet,” Luca said.

She went silent, but hatred rose bright in her face.

Enzo continued. “Thomas was driving the night your mother died.”

Rosa gasped.

My knees almost gave out.

I thought of my father’s stroke-softened face, his slurred apology whenever he dropped a spoon, the way he never spoke of old employers. I had assumed silence was pride. Or pain. Or both.

Luca’s eyes cut to Enzo. “My mother died at home.”

“That is what your father announced.”

The ballroom seemed to tilt.

Carla crossed the space toward Enzo. “Enough.”

“No.” He did not look at her. “I have watched our daughter become exactly what you trained her to be. I will not watch another woman be buried for it.”

The word buried hit the room hard.

Marco’s phone buzzed again.

He did not look away from Luca this time. “They opened the folder.”

“What’s inside?” Luca asked.

“Copies of Emma’s employment forms. Her father’s medical records. Her address. Debt statements. And an old accident report.”

My hands went cold.

Vanessa whispered, “That folder has nothing to do with tonight.”

“Then why hide it behind a mirror?” Luca asked.

She had no answer.

Rosa came to me then. The little old woman Vanessa had tried to banish to the kitchen took my cold hand between both of hers.

“Child,” she said, “did your father ever tell you about Signora Moretti?”

“No.”

“Did he ever keep anything from those days?”

I thought immediately of the metal box in my father’s closet.

Brown. Dented. Locked.

He called it insurance.

Whenever I asked about it, he said some things were safer unopened.

My face must have changed.

Luca noticed.

“What?”

“My father has a box.”

Carla moved so fast for a woman in heels that the guards shifted.

“Do not involve him,” she said.

Luca turned to her. “Now you care about fathers?”

Her nostrils flared.

Enzo looked suddenly exhausted. “Thomas Reed disappeared for three days after she died. When he returned, he quit, married the diner waitress he loved, and never spoke to any of us again.”

“My mother?” I asked.

He nodded.

A strange grief moved through me. My mother had been dead since I was sixteen, and still there were rooms in her life I had never entered.

Marco approached with a photograph in his hand. “This was in the folder.”

He gave it to Luca first.

Luca looked at it, then slowly handed it to me.

The picture showed my father much younger, standing beside a black car in the driveway of the Moretti estate. Beside him stood Luca’s mother, one hand resting lightly on her pregnant stomach.

On the back, in my father’s handwriting, was a date.

And one sentence.

I read it aloud before I understood the words.

“She knew they were going to move against the boy.”

Luca went utterly still.

The boy.

Him.

Vanessa stared at the photograph with a kind of panic that finally seemed real.

“Mother,” she whispered.

Carla did not answer her.

She was staring at me now as if I had become a locked door she meant to break.

Luca looked at Enzo. “Who was going to move against me?”