Chapter 1 - The Man Who Was Supposed to Be Dead
Griffin stared at him.
“My mother never told me your name.”
Salvatore Moretti went still.
Around them, the restaurant had become unnaturally quiet. Even the piano near the windows seemed louder now, every soft note arriving separately.
“She told me my father died before I was born,” Griffin continued. “If you’re about to tell me that was you, you need to step back.”
He did.
Immediately.
That frightened her almost as much as the way his face had changed.
Mr. Henderson appeared beside her, smiling with the desperate determination of a man attempting to survive a difficult customer.
“Griffin, perhaps you should take a break.”
She looked at him.
Twenty minutes earlier, he had threatened to deduct a chipped plate from her wages. Now he sounded ready to offer her his office.
“I need my phone,” she said.
Salvatore reached inside his jacket.
Griffin flinched again.
He stopped, withdrew his empty hand, and let it fall.
“I was going to give you a number.”
“Then say it.”
He did.
She did not write it down.
Instead, she placed the wine bottle on the table and walked toward the kitchen with her knees threatening to fold.
Her phone was inside her coat in the staff closet.
She called her mother.
Roman answered on the fourth ring, breathless.
“Everything okay?”
Griffin closed her eyes.
“Do you know a man named Salvatore Moretti?”
Silence.
Then something struck the floor at the other end of the line.
“Mom?”
“Where are you?”
“At work.”
“Is he there?”
Griffin pressed her free hand against the wall.
“Yes.”
“Listen carefully. Stay somewhere other people can see you. Do not get into his car.”
Behind Griffin, the kitchen door swung open.
Salvatore stood in the doorway alone.
He remained there when she lifted a hand.
“Mom, he says you told me he was dead.”
Roman made a sound Griffin had heard only once before, when a doctor explained that her lungs were getting worse.
Not a sob.
Something smaller.
More frightened.
“Put me on speaker.”
Griffin hesitated, then did.
Salvatore’s face changed at the first sound of Roman breathing.
“Romy.”
“Don’t call me that.”
He looked as though she had struck him.
“You’re alive.”
“Yes.”
“I buried you.”
“No,” Roman said. “You buried what somebody gave you.”
Griffin stared between the phone and the man in the doorway.
Salvatore put one hand against the frame.
“I saw the car.”
“You saw a burned car. You saw what your brother wanted you to see.”
His expression hardened.
“Adrian?”
Roman did not answer.
Griffin pulled the phone closer.
“Mom. Is he my father?”
The silence lasted long enough to change her life.
“Yes,” Roman said.
Griffin sat on an overturned crate.
Somewhere behind her, a cook turned off a running tap.
Twenty-two years.
A father who had existed only as an old sadness.
A mother who never kept photographs.
A ring hidden where a child wasn’t supposed to find it.
Salvatore took one step forward.
Griffin looked up sharply.
“Stay there.”
He stopped.
She could see him trying to decide whether grief gave him permission to move closer.
For once, he seemed to understand that it did not.
“Why?” she asked her mother.
Roman’s voice broke.
“Because I thought keeping you away was the only way to keep you alive.”
Salvatore shook his head.
“I would never have hurt my child.”
“No,” Roman said. “But you had built a world where other people could.”
Griffin looked at the black ring.
The two-headed hawk.
The rose caught in its claws.
It no longer seemed beautiful.
It looked like something that held on too tightly.
“I’m coming home,” she told Roman.
“I’ll send a car,” Salvatore said.
“No.”
He absorbed the word without argument.
Griffin stood and reached for her coat.
“If any of your men follow me, I call the police.”
Luca appeared behind him, his expression unreadable.
Salvatore did not look away from her.
“No one follows her.”
Griffin walked past him.
At the service exit, she turned.
“One thing.”
He waited.
May you like
“If she says she was afraid of you, you don’t get to tell me she wasn’t.”
Then she stepped into the rain and called a cab herself.
