When Matteo spoke my mother’s full name, the air left my lungs so fast my lips parted in a silent, breathless gasp. For twenty-eight years, my mother had made me swear on everything sacred that I would never mention the name Clara Conti inside an Italian social club or near any man who carried bodyguards.
“How do you know her name?” I whispered, taking an instinctive half-step backward toward the swinging kitchen doors.
As I moved, the top button of my crisp white collared shirt shifted just enough for the thin, tarnished silver chain around my neck to slip out from beneath the fabric. Matteo’s eyes dropped instantly to my collarbone, locking onto the small, fire-blackened silver oval locket resting above my apron bib.
The blood drained from Matteo’s face as he shoved his chair back so hard it nearly toppled onto the carpet. “Marco!” Matteo barked, his voice echoing off the walnut walls. “Bolt the front oak doors and lock the alley exit right now! Nobody leaves this building!”
Marco moved with terrifying speed, crossing the dining room in four strides and throwing the heavy brass deadbolts on the front entrance before standing guard across the hallway. Before I could turn to run, Chef Dante came bursting out of the kitchen doors, wiping his hands on his chef’s coat with a panicked, greedy smile as he saw Matteo standing over the stew bowl.
“Mr. Moretti! I saw you stand up—was the braised beef to your liking?” Chef Dante babbled, stepping between me and the table and shoving my shoulder back toward the scullery. “It’s my personal family recipe from Naples, Mr. Moretti! This clumsy dishwasher girl barely knows how to carry a bowl without spilling it—get back in the kitchen, Elena!”
Matteo didn’t even blink as he stepped around the corner of the table, his eyes burning with a cold fury that froze Chef Dante mid-sentence. “Your personal recipe from Naples?” Matteo repeated softly. “Tell me, Dante—what did you crush with the fennel seeds before the third reduction?”
Chef Dante’s mouth opened and closed like a landed fish, sweat beading across his forehead under the amber light. “Well—garlic, of course, Mr. Moretti, and fresh thyme—“
“If you ever put garlic in my mother’s Sunday beef stew, she would have broken the wooden spoon over your knuckles,” Matteo said in a deadly quiet voice. “And if you lie to my face again in the next ten seconds, Marco is going to lock you in your own walk-in freezer. This girl made that stew. Now step against that wall and don’t make a sound.”
Chef Dante backed against the wood wainscoting with his hands raised, trembling from head to toe, while Matteo turned back to me. All the cold menace in the crime boss’s posture had vanished, replaced by a raw, shaking intensity I had never seen in a grown man.
“That oval locket around your neck,” Matteo said, his voice cracking slightly as he pointed a finger toward my collar without touching me. “If you press the dented catch on the left rim, there is an engraving inside the lid that says Per Clara, Luce di Casa—and a tiny scorch mark on the hinge from the night of October fourteenth.”
My hand flew up to clutch the silver locket at my throat, tears springing into my eyes. “My mother wore this every day of her life until the cancer took her two winters ago,” I said, my voice shaking. “She told me our whole family died in a fire in Sicily six years before I was born, and that she changed her surname to Conti when she worked her way onto a cargo steamer to New York so the men who burned our house would never find her.”
Matteo closed his eyes for a brief second, bracing his right hand against the white tablecloth as if his knees had nearly given out. “Clara Conti was born Clara Moretti,” he said hoarsely when he opened his eyes. “She was my older sister. For twenty-two years, I visited an empty marble stone on a hillside in Palermo thinking she burned to death in the east wing when our uncle’s rivals hit the estate.”
“ Wait—your uncle?” I breathed, my heart hammering against my ribs as I remembered the worn leather book sitting inside my metal staff locker in the back hallway. “You still work with Don Lorenzo Moretti?”
Matteo’s brow furrowed sharply at the alarm in my voice. “Uncle Lorenzo took me in after the fire and helped me rebuild the family from the ashes,” Matteo said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Because my mother didn’t just leave me this locket and her beef stew recipe,” I said, turning toward the swinging oak doors of the kitchen. “Come with me to my locker in the back corridor right now—before your uncle finds out I’m still alive.”
