He reached for the gold button where it had rolled beneath the console table. He picked it up. Then he held it toward Lily. The child looked out from her mother’s shoulder. Her cheeks were wet. She saw the button. Her tiny fingers closed around the gold object, then around the tip of Alessandro’s thumb.
She looked directly into his face. Something struck him beneath the ribs. Recognition. Not certainty yet. But something very close.
He stood. Then he turned toward Isabella.
“Rosa and Lily are not going anywhere. Not tonight. Not ever.”
Isabella’s face became still. “Upstairs. Now.” She obeyed.
Alessandro turned toward everyone else. “Out.” The hallway emptied.
Lily eventually fell asleep against Rosa’s chest, her small hand still wrapped around the gold button. Rosa remained on the floor. Alessandro stood several feet away. Then he spoke.
“Rosa. Look at me.” She slowly raised her face. Her eyes were wet.
Then he asked the question he had carried silently for months.
“Why have you never told me she is our daughter?”
The Secret Beneath the Marble
Rosa stopped breathing. Her arms tightened around Lily. “She has my mother’s eyes,” Alessandro said softly. Elena Moretti had died when Alessandro was twelve, in a car crash outside Naples under circumstances his father had never fully explained. Elena’s eyes had been large, dark, and gentle. Lily’s were the same.
“If I had told you,” Rosa whispered, “she would never have known peace, Don Alessandro. She would have been born into a war.”
“Four years ago,” Alessandro murmured, his mind racing backward, “the night the Brooklyn warehouses burned… the night my father died.”
“You were wounded,” Rosa said. “You stumbled into the lower servant quarters near the old cellar. Your shoulder was torn open by shrapnel. You didn’t want the family doctor because you didn’t know who among your captains had betrayed your father.”
“You cleaned the blood. You kept me hidden in that cellar for two days while my men searched the city. I never saw your face clearly in the dark.”
“I was twenty-seven, working my first week on your staff,” Rosa whispered. “You were feverish, delirious, holding my wrist thinking I was an angel… and when the fever broke on the third night, you took me into your arms before you left for the war in Manhattan. By the time you returned three weeks later as the new Don, I was just another maid in a uniform.”
Alessandro lifted her effortlessly to her feet. “You should have come to me when you realized you were carrying her. You let my child sleep on a blanket in a kitchen pantry while I slept in a twelve-bedroom manor.”
“Look at where we are standing, Alessandro!” Rosa choked out, using his first name for the first time in four years. “Six months ago, you brought Isabella Romano into this house to secure an alliance with Chicago! If Vincent Romano found out you had a child with a maid — a child born out of wedlock with legitimate blood — what do you think would have happened to Lily?!”
The words hit Alessandro like a physical blow. Rosa was right. In the brutal arithmetic of the underworld, an unacknowledged blood heir to the Moretti throne was a target.
Before he could speak, Isabella Romano stood on the landing, wrapped in a dark green silk robe. “Is there a reason my fiancé is playing guardian angel to the kitchen staff? Or should I call my father and tell him the Moretti estate has turned into an orphanage?”
Alessandro turned his head, his expression freezing into pure iron. “Isabella. Go back to your room.”
“Excuse me? I am the daughter of Vincent Romano. I will not be ordered around like a dog because a dirty little street rat dropped a button.”
“You touched the child’s shoulder when you screamed at her,” Alessandro said, taking one slow, heavy step toward the stairs. “I saw it from the balcony.”
Isabella laughed coldly. “I pushed her away! She was touching my silk robe with her sticky little fingers! If you think I’m going to live in a house where servants’ bastards run wild—”
CLANG. Alessandro’s hand hit the iron banister beside her head so hard the heavy structure groaned.
“Listen to me very carefully, Isabella. If you ever raise your voice to that child again, if you ever look at her mother with disgust, or if you ever cross the threshold of that kitchen without my permission… I will personally send you back to Chicago in a pine box, and your father will thank me for saving him the embarrassment of your funeral.”