“What are you asking?” I whispered.
“Come to my house tomorrow. Not as a waitress.” His eyes held mine. “Come as the woman my son chose.”
To be continued
I should have said no. Every sensible part of me — the part that paid rent and fixed cars and survived eleven months at Aurelia by staying invisible — screamed at me to say no.
But Leo’s fist was still curled around my mother’s necklace, and somewhere in the back of my mind, my grandmother’s voice kept repeating its warning: Claire had no family worth finding.
What if she was wrong? What if my mother spent her whole life hiding from something — and the most dangerous man in Philadelphia was the only person who could tell me what it was?
“What time?” I heard myself ask.
Luca Moretti almost smiled. “Nine. And Avery — ”
“Yes?”
“Don’t tell anyone where you’re going.”
The story doesn’t end here. What did Luca discover about Claire Mercer’s past — and why did someone work so hard to erase her? Part 2 is coming.
The morning after
I did not sleep that night. I lay in my small apartment staring at the ceiling, Leo’s weight still ghosting my arms, turning the silver oval over and over between my fingers. The six-pointed flower caught the streetlight from my window, and for the first time in eighteen years, I really looked at it — not as my mother’s necklace, but as evidence.
Had my mother known? Had Claire Mercer spent her whole adult life glancing over her shoulder, working diner doubles, telling no one where she came from — because she knew that somewhere, a man like Luca Moretti existed, and that being found could get her daughter killed?
My grandmother’s voice came back to me again, sharper this time: Claire had no family worth finding. It had always sounded like bitterness. Now it sounded like a warning — or a cover story she had repeated so often she started believing it herself.
At 8:40 the next morning, my phone buzzed with a text from Greg: Are you alive? Half the staff is saying you got kidnapped by the mob. The other half wants your autograph.
I almost laughed. Then a black car pulled up outside my building at exactly nine, and laughing was the last thing on my mind.
Marco DeSantis got out and opened the rear door for me like I was someone who mattered. “Miss Avery,” he said, and there was something almost gentle in it. “The boss doesn’t bring people to the house. Ever. You should know that before you get in.”
I got in anyway. Because somewhere in that house was a ten-month-old boy who had chosen me out of a room full of strangers — and a photograph of a woman with my mother’s face that somebody, eleven months ago, had decided the world should never see.
I was going to find out why.