Page 82 of The Mafia King's Lost Son
My eyes fly open and I nearly choke on my breath.
“Scarlett?” Dante leans forward in his chair in concern. “What is it? What did you see?”
I stare at him and my mind is racing so fast I can barely keep up with the thoughts. Because I know what those words mean. I’ve known for six years, ever since I paid a private investigator a gross amount to dig up everything he could find on the Marchetti family.
The PI found newspaper archives dated back decades. Obituaries. Birth announcements. And one detail that stuck with me because it seemed so specific: the Marchetti family held their funerals at St. Sebastian’s Cathedral in Brooklyn for over a hundred years. The church closed in the eighties. Abandoned and left to rot.
That’s where Antonio must have hid the ledger.
Which means I’m holding the answer everyone in this city is killing for. And if I tell Dante, he’ll go after it. The other families will find out and that will mean trouble. They’ll gather at that cathedral, and lots of people will die in the process.
“Scarlett.” Dante’s voice pulls me out of the thought. “Talk to me. What did you remember?”
I open my mouth and what comes out is a lie.
“Nothing. It slipped away.” I press my hand to my forehead because it’s not entirely fake, my head really is throbbing. “I thought I had it but then it just…disappeared.”
He watches me for a long moment and I force myself to hold his gaze even though everything in me wants to look away. Lying to Dante feels wrong in ways I didn’t expect. When did that happen? When did his opinion start mattering so much?
“You’re pale,” he says finally. “We’ve been pushing too hard.”
“Maybe. I think I need to lie down.”
“Yeah, you need rest. We’ll try again tomorrow.”
I practically run out of his office, my heart hammering against my ribs. Rosa is in the kitchen when I pass through and she calls out something about lunch, but I just wave her off and keep moving until I’m in my room with the door closed.
Then I sit on the edge of the bed and try to figure out what the hell I’m supposed to do.
There’s no good choice here. Both choices are filled with different cons.
I spend the rest of the morning in my room, pretending to rest but staring at the ceiling and running through the same thoughts over and over. Rosa brings lunch that I barely touch. And when Luca comes in wanting to play, I do my best to be present for him, but my mind keeps drifting back to that memory.
Around two p.m., Elena shows up with her kids.
We get the children settled in the playroom. Rosa agrees to watch them while Elena and I retreat to the sitting room where no one will interrupt us.
“Alright.” Elena drops onto the couch and fixes me with a look. “Spill. You’ve got that face.”
“What face?”
“The face that says you’re carrying something heavy and you’re about to collapse under the weight of it.” She pats the cushion next to her. “Sit. Talk to me.”
So I sit, then I tell her everything.
About the memory session, and what I recalled. About the PI I hired six years ago. That I put it together.
But I don’t tell her the location either.
“So let me get this straight,” Elena says when I finish. “You know where the ledger is. And you haven’t told Dante.”
“I lied to his face this morning. Told him I couldn’t remember.”
“Why?”
“Because if I tell him, people will die. He will go after it and every family in the city will show up ready for war. It’ll be disastrous.”
Elena is quiet for a moment. Then she leans forward and takes both my hands in hers.
