Chapter 4 - The Housekeeper’s Reckoning
The basement of the Moretti estate was cool, dark, and smelled of oak barrels and wet stone.
Mrs. Gable sat tied to a heavy wooden chair in the center of the secondary storage vault. She was a woman in her late fifties, her hair pulled into a tight gray bun, her uniform apron stained with kitchen grease. She was trembling so violently the wooden legs of her chair rattled against the concrete floor.
The iron door creaked open, and Dante stepped inside.
He wasn't wearing his jacket. His white shirt sleeves were rolled up to his forearms, revealing the dark, intricate ink of his family crest tattooed across his right forearm. He walked slowly, pulling a silver pocket knife from his trousers and opening the blade with a soft click.
“Mr. Moretti!” Mrs. Gable wept instantly, her voice echoing off the stone walls. “Please! I had no choice! They were going to kill my brother’s little boys! They knew everything about us!”
Dante stopped two feet away from her. He didn't look angry. That was what frightened people who knew him—Dante Moretti was most dangerous when he was completely calm.
“You lived in this house for twelve years,” Dante said softly. “I paid your medical bills when your husband had cancer. I put your nephew through vocational school.”
“I know! God help me, I know!” she sobbed.
“And yet,” Dante continued, examining the razor-sharp edge of his knife, “you put poison into a mother’s tea while her three-year-old child was sleeping in the next room.”
“They forced me!”
“You could have walked up to my door,” Dante said, his eyes locking onto hers with terrifying intensity. “You could have told me Arthur Callahan was pressing you. I would have protected your family in Boston within two hours. Instead, you chose to execute a helpless woman in my servant quarters.”
Mrs. Gable’s breath caught in her throat. She looked at the cold, unforgiving eyes of the man who ruled the city’s underground, and she knew there was no mercy left in the room.
“Is she dead?” Mrs. Gable whispered, her chin quivering.
Dante leaned down until his face was inches from hers. “No. Her daughter walked across my house and saved her.”
He closed his pocket knife with a sharp snap and turned toward the open doorway.
“Marco,” Dante called out quietly.
Marco stepped into the light. “Yes, Boss?”
“Call the district attorney,” Dante ordered. “Give him the complete surveillance footage of Mrs. Gable poisoning the tea, along with the wiretap recordings of her calls to Boston. She will spend the rest of her natural life in a state penitentiary for attempted murder.”
Mrs. Gable blinked in shock. “You’re... you’re giving me to the police?”
May you like
Dante looked back over his shoulder, his expression stone cold.
“Death is an easy way out, Evelyn,” Dante said flatly. “You are going to sit in a ten-by-ten cell every single day, knowing that Arthur Callahan’s men will be coming for you inside the prison walls, and I will not be there to stop them.”
