Chapter 2
I closed Bellini’s Cafe.
Not for the public.
For the family.
Every employee who had witnessed the attack was moved into the dining room with trusted guards, while Rafe secured the private lounge. Claire refused medical rest until Sofia finally agreed to sit beside her instead of in her arms.
I stayed across from them.
Claire kept touching the old photograph.
“My foster mother had one picture of Rachel,” she said. “Only her face. She never told me the Bellini name.”
“Who was your foster mother?”
“Evelyn Hart.”
Rafe looked up immediately.
I noticed.
“You know the name?”
He hesitated.
“Rachel had a housekeeper named Evelyn.”
Claire stared at him.
Lucia laughed again.
“Wonderful. Now servants are rewriting our family history.”
I turned toward her.
“You seem unusually interested in stopping people from speaking.”
She smiled.
“You’ve always confused silence with guilt.”
“No.”
I looked toward Marco.
“I confuse punching me over a photograph with guilt.”
Marco wiped blood from his mouth.
“That waitress brought trouble into the cafe.”
Claire’s expression changed.
“The men who shot me asked for my necklace.”
The room went silent.
I looked at her.
“What?”
Claire swallowed.
“It happened behind the service entrance. Two men came through the alley. One grabbed my shoulder and told me to give him the moon.”
Rafe’s jaw tightened.
“You never told me that.”
“I was bleeding.”
She looked almost apologetic.
“They ran when the kitchen staff came out.”
I turned toward Marco.
He looked away.
There it was.
The attack had not been random violence spilling toward my daughter.
Claire had been the target before Sofia ever climbed into her arms.
Rafe brought up the cafe surveillance feed. One frame showed the attackers entering through the alley.
Another showed something worse.
Ten minutes earlier, Marco had walked through the same service corridor.
He stopped at the rear door.
Looked directly at the camera.
Then moved one of my guards away from the entrance.
Marco stared at the screen.
“That proves nothing.”
Rafe spoke quietly.
“You reassigned the only man covering the alley.”
“I needed him outside.”
“For what?”
Marco said nothing.
Claire’s hand tightened around her pendant.
Then Sofia looked at the photograph again.
“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
She pointed toward Rachel’s hand.
Rachel was holding something.
A second half-circle pendant.
Not identical.
Opposite.
Claire wore one half of a moon.
Rachel had worn the other.
May you like
And suddenly I understood why someone had been willing to shoot Claire for hers.
The pendant was incomplete by itself.
