CHAPTER 1: THE TRACT OF SILENCE
Marcus squinted, his seasoned eyes scanning the maid's rigid posture. "Boss, she’s terrified. But everyone in this room is terrified of you when you look like you’re about to murder someone."
"She’s not afraid of me," Lorenzo said, his voice dropping into a register so dark it felt like cold oil spilling over stone. "She’s afraid I’ve finally seen her."
Lorenzo didn't walk; he glided across the expanse of polished marble, a predator cutting through a sea of silk, velvet, and diamonds. The violin quartet, sensing the suffocating drop in air pressure near the head table, faltered. A sharp, dissonant scrape of a bow against a string cut through the air before dissolving into dead silence. Guests turned, their champagne flutes hovering inches from their lips, conversation dying like flame starved of oxygen.
Sophia didn't run. Her knees had locked, trapped by the gravity of the man approaching her.
Lorenzo stopped a mere arm's length away. Up close, the fine tremors wracking her frame were violent. The scent of cheap lemon soap and sweat clung to her linen apron.
"The bassinet," Lorenzo said softly. He didn't raise his voice, yet the word carried the weight of a guillotine blade. "The night of the fire at the cliffside villa. You weren't at the agency yet, were you, Sophia?"
"M-Mr. DeLuca..." Sophia gasped, her hands clutching her apron so hard the seams creaked. "I... I just work here. I don't—"
"Emma knows the sound of her mother's hum," Lorenzo interrupted, leaning down until his eyes—sharp, storm-gray, and utterly devoid of mercy—were level with hers. "She hums it in her sleep. A Sicilian lullaby Isabella only sang when the doors were shut and the guards were dismissed. I thought it was a ghost haunting my daughter's dreams."
He reached out, his gloved fingers gently, almost tenderly, catching Sophia by the jaw. The touch made her sob softly.
"Where is my wife?"
"If I tell you," Sophia wept, her voice breaking into a desperate, ragged whisper, "they will kill my brother. They have him in Palermo. They told me... they told me if I kept the little girl quiet, if I made sure she forgot... they’d let him live."
Behind Lorenzo, Marcus’s hand vanished inside his tailored suit jacket, his fingers wrapping around the cold grip of his suppressed firearm. "Lorenzo," Marcus growled low. "We have a leak. The perimeter—"
"Who ordered it?" Lorenzo ignored Marcus, his grip on Sophia’s jaw tightening just enough to bring her to her tiptoes. "Who took her from that house before it burned?"
Sophia’s eyes darted past Lorenzo’s shoulder, not toward the grand entrance, but toward the velvet-curtained balcony where the DeLuca family council sat—the men who had helped Lorenzo mourn, the men who had carried Isabella’s empty casket down the cathedral steps.
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She didn't have to utter a name. Her gaze locked onto Don Julian DeLuca—Lorenzo’s uncle, the patriarch who had advised him to move on, to sign over the northern shipping routes to 'consolidate the family’s grief.'
Julian was standing near the balcony rail, a glass of thirty-year-old scotch balanced effortlessly in his hand. But his relaxed smile had withered, replaced by a cold, calculating stillness.
