Chapter 2 - The Taste of Almonds
Camila took a delicate step backward, her diamond bracelet clinking against her wrist. “Dante, she’s a maid. She destroyed fifty thousand dollars of private reserve! I was merely enforcing discipline—”
“You are a guest in this house,” Dante interrupted. His voice wasn’t raised, but it carried an authority that made two hundred billionaires shrink back against the mirrored walls. “You do not discipline my staff. You do not wield weapons in my hall. And you do not speak while I am looking at evidence.”
Dante dropped the broken crop onto the marble. It landed with a dull clatter.
Julian Sterling moved forward, his smile sweating around the edges. “Dante, please. My sister is emotional. It was an irreplaceable vintage meant specifically to celebrate your merger with our shipping lines. The maid tripped. It was an accident born of sheer negligence.”
I remained on the floor. I knew the rules of survival in the Moretti household: never speak unless ordered, never show weakness, and never reveal how much you see. But the venom in Julian’s eyes warned me that if I went to the cellar tonight, I wouldn't leave it alive.
“Get up,” Dante commanded.
I braced my hands on the clean patch of stone beside the puddle and pushed myself up. My knee screamed in protest where a glass shard had sliced through my trousers, but I stood straight. At five-foot-eight and two hundred and ten pounds, I took up space. Camila had spent the last three months making sure every servant knew that my size made me an eyesore in her pristine aesthetic vision.
Dante stood before me. He was six-foot-four, broad-shouldered, and cast a shadow that completely swallowed mine. For the first time, he looked directly into my face.
His eyes narrowed slightly. There was no disgust in them, no mockery—only a terrifying, laser-focused assessment that seemed to catalog every breath I took.
“Your name,” he said.
“Clara Vance, sir.”
“Why did you hit the pedestal, Clara?”
“I slipped, Mr. Moretti.”
Julian let out a sharp sigh of relief. “You see? She admits it. Send her to the precinct and let’s resume the party.”
“Quiet, Julian,” Dante said, without breaking eye contact with me. “Clara has worked my cellars for eighteen months. She moves six-hundred-pound casks across narrow oak beams without breaking a single seal. She doesn't slip on polished stone.”
Dante knelt down.
Gasping whispers rippled through the gallery. Dante Moretti—head of the Five Families, a man who executed rivals in back alleys without dirtying his cuffs—was kneeling in a puddle of wine in a five-thousand-dollar suit.
He dipped two calloused fingers into the dark puddle near my boots.
He brought them toward his face.
“Dante, don’t!” I blurted out.
The ballroom gasped again. To bark an order at Dante Moretti was a death sentence.
Dante froze, his hand an inch from his lips. He looked up at me through dark eyelashes. “Why not, Clara?”
“The undertones are incorrect for a 1945 Burgundy,” I said, keeping my chin elevated despite the blood dripping down my collar. “A true Romanée-Conti carries notes of dried rose petals, leather, and damp earth. That puddle smells of bitter almonds and metallic zinc.”
Dante’s eyes locked onto mine. The temperature in the room plummeted below freezing.
Behind him, Julian Sterling’s face turned the color of spoiled milk. He took half a step toward the terrace doors.
“Mikhail,” Dante said softly.
Two massive men in identical black tactical suits detached from the shadows near the entrance. In three strides, they had Julian Sterling pinned against a marble column, an arm twisted behind his back.
“Dante! What is the meaning of this?!” Camila screamed, her aristocratic composure entirely shattering. “He’s my brother! He’s your business partner!”
Dante stood up slowly. He wiped his fingers on a white linen handkerchief he drew from his breast pocket. Then he tossed the handkerchief onto the floor.
“Mikhail,” Dante ordered coldly. “Bring the house chemist up from the medical bay. Fetch a testing kit. If there is cyanide in that vintage, Julian will drink the remainder of the puddle off this floor.”
He turned back to me. His hand reached out, firm and unexpectedly warm, and took me by the elbow.
“You’re bleeding,” he said.
“It’s negligible, sir.”
May you like
“I decide what is negligible in this house,” he replied, his voice dropping into a dangerous, possessive register that sent a shiver straight down my spine. “Walk with me. Now.”
***
