Rose Garden

Chapter 08 - Rose Garden

Marco caught the man before he reached the stairs.

I never saw his face.

Only a flash of dark coat, the scrape of shoes, Marco’s arm moving once, and then the heavy thud of a body hitting the wall.

Luca told me to stay in the kitchen.

I did not.

Maybe I should have. Maybe a wiser woman would have remembered that maids survive by avoiding the rooms where powerful men handle their problems.

But my father had been threatened in his own bedroom, and my mother’s note was open on the table.

I was done surviving politely.

The man Marco dragged inside was the same kitchen assistant from the ballroom.

Paulie.

His flour-stained sleeve was gone now, replaced by a black raincoat too expensive for him.

He looked at me once, then away.

“You followed us?” Luca asked.

Paulie’s mouth trembled. “They told me to.”

“Who?”

He swallowed.

“The Bellini woman.”

“Vanessa?”

“No.”

“Carla,” I said.

Paulie closed his eyes.

Luca crouched in front of him.

I had seen Luca gentle with Rosa. I had seen him cold with Vanessa. This was different. This was the quiet voice men used when they had already decided where the conversation would end.

“You broke into Thomas Reed’s apartment?”

“No. Another man did. I just had to watch the building and tell them if she came.”

“Where is the box?”

“I don’t know.”

Marco’s hand tightened on Paulie’s shoulder.

“I swear,” Paulie said quickly. “They took it to Mrs. Bellini’s driver. He left before you got here.”

Luca’s face did not change.

“That box can be replaced,” my father said from the bedroom doorway.

I turned.

He stood with Dr. Vale supporting him, his face gray and stubborn.

“Dad, sit down.”

“I spent twenty-six years sitting down.”

The words echoed Enzo Bellini’s from the ballroom so closely that I understood old guilt had a common language.

Luca rose.

My father looked smaller standing in our narrow hallway, but his voice steadied.

“The tape matters more.”

We did not own a cassette player.

Luca did.

Of course he did.

One appeared within fifteen minutes, delivered by a man in a black coat who did not ask why a mafia boss needed 1980s technology in a second-floor apartment at midnight.

We gathered around my kitchen table.

My father.

Me.

Luca.

Marco near the door.

Dr. Vale hovering because my father looked one bad memory away from another stroke.

Luca pressed play.

At first there was only static.

Then a woman’s voice.

Soft.

Young.

Tired.

I knew it was Luca’s mother before his face confirmed it.

“If anything happens to me, Thomas has a copy. Rosa has the letters. The nursery wall has the names.”

Luca closed his eyes.

A man spoke next.

Luca’s father.

“You’re being hysterical.”

“No,” she answered. “I’m being inconvenient.”

Another woman laughed.

Carla Bellini.

The sound made my skin crawl.

“Your son will inherit what men built,” Carla said. “Stop pretending a mother’s conscience can change family business.”

“My son will not be traded like a dock contract.”

“He already has been,” Carla said. “You signed the first paper when he was six months old.”

Luca’s eyes opened.

“What paper?” he whispered.

On the tape, his mother’s voice broke.

“I thought it was protection.”

“It was,” Luca’s father said. “For the families.”

A chair scraped.

Then Carla said the sentence that made my father grip the table.

“The Bellini daughter will marry the Moretti heir. If not Vanessa, then whoever comes after her. That is the price of peace.”

Luca stood so suddenly the chair nearly fell.

Vanessa had not been chosen by romance.

She had been assigned by contract.

But the tape continued.

Luca’s mother said, “And if I refuse?”

Carla replied, “Then accidents happen. Cars leave roads. Children lose mothers.”

Static swallowed the next few seconds.

When the voices returned, Luca’s mother was crying, but she still sounded fierce.

“Thomas knows. Rosa knows. If I die, my son will know too.”

Then came Luca’s father.

“You should have stayed quiet.”

A loud crack.

Not a gunshot.

A hand striking flesh.

Luca turned away.

Rosa had said his mother was dying, not foolish.

The tape was teaching us she had been trapped long before she died.

At the end, my mother’s voice appeared unexpectedly.

A younger version of the woman I barely remembered.

“Thomas, hide it. If we keep the boy alive, maybe one day he becomes different from them.”

The tape clicked off.

No one spoke.

My father looked at Luca with twenty-six years of exhaustion in his eyes.

“We were supposed to tell you when you turned eighteen,” he said. “Your father found out. We ran.”

Luca’s voice was rough. “Why did you never come back?”

My father looked at me.

“Because Carla Bellini sent men to the hospital the day Emma was born.”

I felt the room drop away beneath me.

Luca turned toward me slowly.

“What did she want with Emma?”

My father’s mouth twisted with grief.

“She wanted to make sure Thomas Reed never had anything left to lose.”

A phone buzzed.

Marco checked it.

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His expression changed.

“Boss,” he said, “Rosa is missing.”