Chapter 2 - The Tailor’s Secret
Dante stared at the folded sheet of paper in his hands. The wax crayon marks were uneven, the heavy strokes of a four-year-old child, but the detail was unmistakable. Maestro Bellini, the master craftsman who had stitched bespoke suits for the Rossi family for three generations, had placed a bug inside the silk lining of Dante’s necktie.
"Did he say anything to you, Lily?" Dante kept his voice soft, shedding the icy cadence that routinely brought hardened racketeers to their knees. He lowered himself further, resting his palms on his knees so his gaze remained level with hers.
Lily tilted her head, her dark curls bouncing. She tapped the crayon drawing with a chipped fingernail. "He didn’t know I was under the curtain. I was playing hide-and-seek with Mr. Whiskers, the orange cat. The tailor man was crying. His hands were shaking like this." Lily fluttered her tiny fingers in the air. "Then another man came in through the back alley door. He had shiny boots with silver tips and gave the tailor man a silver coin."
Dante’s jaw tightened. Silver-tipped boots. That was not a tailor’s customer; that was a signature flourish worn by Luca "The Razor" Varga, an enforcer belonging to the rival Marcone syndicate.
"Did the man with shiny boots see you?" Dante asked, his pulse steadying into a dangerous, rhythmic calm.
"No," Lily whispered proudly, placing a finger over her lips. "I was super quiet. Like a mouse. But Mommy called my name from the street, and the man with the shiny boots jumped. He told the tailor man that if Dante wore the tie to the city council luncheon, the whole Rossi empire would burn from the inside out."
Dante’s chest tightened. The luncheon had taken place yesterday afternoon. If Lily had not snatched the kitchen shears and snipped the silk off his neck right as he walked out the front doors, Dante would have spent four hours in a private boardroom discussing shipping routes, political alliances, and port concessions with government officials—every whisper transmitted straight into the ears of federal prosecutors or rival hit squads.
The men in the foyer had laughed when the little girl in the oversized lemon dress severed the three-thousand-dollar silk. They had called her an unruly brat. They had joked that Dante was losing his touch for allowing a maid's child to run wild with sharp objects.
They had no idea she had saved his life.
Dante reached out, his calloused thumb gently brushing a speck of blue crayon from Lily’s cheek. "You did very well, little one. Better than my best soldiers."
Lily beamed, revealing a gap where her baby tooth was loose. "Do I get a gold star?"
"You get whatever you want," Dante said quietly.
He stood up, towering over the Persian rug once more. The softness vanished from his eyes, replaced by the lethal authority of a man who ruled the city's underworld with an iron fist. He stepped to the library door and pulled it open.
Marco stood alert in the hallway, his hand resting instinctively near the holster beneath his armpit.
"Don Dante?"
"Call a security sweep on the estate. No one leaves. No staff, no drivers, no lieutenants," Dante commanded, his voice dropping into a lethal murmur. "And bring Maestro Bellini to the warehouse on Pier 4. Tell him he has thirty minutes to explain why a wire was sewn into my collar, or his grandson will never finish his violin lessons."
Marco’s eyes widened with sudden understanding. He bowed his head immediately. "Understood, boss. What about the girl and her mother?"
Dante looked back into the sunlit library. Lily was happily arranging her crayons in neat color-coded rows along the mahogany coffee table.
May you like
"Move Elena and Lily into the west wing guest suites on the third floor," Dante ordered. "Place four men at the staircase. If so much as a stray fly buzzes near that child, I want someone's head on a spike."
***
