The Mafia King's Ruthless Claim

Fiona's POV

The wine cellar always smelled of wet stone and old money. Tonight it smelled of copper.

I noticed that first. Before the shape on the floor. Before the dark puddle creeping toward the drain in the middle of the room. My bucket slipped out of my hand and hit the stone with a clang that bounced off a thousand bottles of wine, each one worth more than everything I owned.

Then the silence came back, heavy and cold.

"Hello?" My voice came out thin. Stupid. Who did I expect to answer?

The man lay on his side between the Italian reds and the champagne racks. One arm was stretched out like he had been reaching for something. His gray suit was expensive. His shoes were polished. And the back of his head was wrong in a way my mind refused to finish looking at.

I should have run. Any normal housekeeper would have run.

But eight years ago I was not a housekeeper, and my body remembered that before my brain did. I was on my knees beside him before I knew I had moved. Two fingers on his neck. Nothing. His skin was cool but not cold. An hour, maybe less.

"Okay," I whispered. "Okay, okay."

My hands were shaking. They never used to shake.

It had been a long night already. The Morettis had hosted forty guests for dinner, men in dark suits who laughed too loud and women who barely touched their food. At eleven, Rosa sent me down for two more bottles of Barolo because Mr. Moretti's younger brother wanted to celebrate something. Nobody said what.

The cellar door was supposed to be locked after ten. Always. It was the first rule Rosa taught me two years ago, on my very first day. Tonight it had been open a crack, the old iron key still hanging in the lock.

I looked at the dead man's face, and something cold slid down my spine.

I knew him. Not well. He came to the house sometimes, always through the side door. He wore a silver ring on his little finger, and he always looked at me a second too long, like he was trying to remember where he had seen me before. I never liked it. I never knew why.

Now his eyes were open and fixed on nothing, and I still couldn't place him.

Something glinted near his hand. I leaned closer.

A cufflink, small and gold, shaped like a tiny ship's anchor. It wasn't his. His cuffs had plain buttons. Somebody had lost it here, maybe in a struggle, maybe while dragging him.

I don't know why I picked it up. Maybe because I had spent two years picking things up in this house. Maybe because a small part of me, the part that used to stand in operating rooms with a stranger's life in my hands, needed to know what happened. I slid it into my apron pocket, and it sat there like a stone.

Above me, the old house groaned. Pipes. Wind.

Footsteps.

Footsteps.

I scrambled back so fast I knocked into a rack. A bottle rocked in its slot, and I caught it with both hands before it fell. My heart pounded so hard I could hear it in my ears.

The bucket. It was still sitting next to the body in the middle of the floor. Anyone who came down would know someone had been here. I lunged for it, but the water sloshed over the side and spread across the stone, mixing with the dark puddle.

No. No, no, no.

The door at the top of the stairs creaked.

I thought of Milo. He was nine years old and asleep on Mrs. Bell's couch three blocks from the docks, probably still wearing his socks because he hated cold feet. He had my stubborn chin and his father's dark eyes. His father, who went out for cigarettes when I was six months pregnant and never came back.

If something happened to me down here, Milo would have nobody.

Eight years ago, I would have known exactly what to do. I would have called it in, noted the time of death and written my report in neat block letters. Then a man died on my table on a night I still can't fully remember, and people I trusted stood up in a hearing room and swore I smelled of vodka. I hadn't touched a drink in months. It didn't matter. By the end of that winter I had no license, no savings and a one year old son to feed.

So I learned something the hard way. A woman with a past like mine doesn't call the police from a mobster's basement. She doesn't get believed. She gets blamed.

I pushed the bucket behind the champagne rack and squeezed into the narrow gap between two shelves at the back. It was so tight the wood pressed into my shoulder blades. I could smell dust and cork and my own fear, sharp and sour.

A light clicked on. The single bulb at the bottom of the stairs swung on its cord, and shadows rocked back and forth across the floor like water.

Someone came down slowly. One step. Then another. Not hurried. Not scared. The steps of a person who knew exactly what was waiting at the bottom.

From my gap I could see only a slice of the room. The dead man's shoes. The wet floor. Then a pair of black leather shoes stepped into view and stopped.

For a long moment, nothing happened.

I held my breath until my lungs burned. My fingers closed around the cufflink in my pocket so hard the anchor bit into my palm.

The shoes turned. They walked to the champagne rack and stopped exactly where I had hidden the bucket.

I heard a soft sound, almost a sigh. Then a lighter clicked, and cigarette smoke drifted through the cellar.

"You must be cold," a man's voice said, low and calm. "That corner is drafty."

My whole body went still.

I knew that voice. Everyone in this city knew that voice, even people who had never heard it. It belonged to the man who owned half the docks, the union halls and the restaurants on Harbor Street, and, if you believed the rumors, a few judges too. It belonged to the man whose shirts I ironed every Tuesday and whose name I had never once said out loud.

Luca Moretti.

In two years he had spoken to me maybe five times. Thank you. That's fine. Leave it. He never looked at the staff. He moved through his own house like a ghost in a tailored suit, and we all learned to disappear around him.

Now he stood ten feet from a dead man, smoking like he was waiting for a bus.

I didn't move. Maybe he was guessing. Maybe he would leave.

"The bucket has your name on it," he said. "Rosa labels everything. You know that."

My eyes stung. Of course she did. Fiona, in black marker on blue plastic.

I thought about running for the stairs, but he was between me and them. I thought about screaming. The party upstairs was loud, and these walls were thick stone. Nobody would hear. And even if they did, who in this house would come running for the maid?

The shoes came closer. They stopped right in front of my hiding place. I could see the crease in his trousers, sharp as a blade.

"Come out," he said quietly. "Fiona."

In two years of cleaning his house, he had never once said my name.