Chapter 4 - The Unanswered Call
The social elite of Cook County parted instinctively before Vincent Moretti’s path, like water dividing before the bow of an iron warship. Guests who had spent the last two hours hoping for a word or a nod from the city’s shadow boss took one look at his face and recoiled, their manufactured smiles freezing and dissolving into immediate, primal dread. Vincent’s eyes were wild, unblinking, and sunken with an intensity that promised sudden violence. His hands were curled into tight fists at his sides, the veins along his forearms bulging against the cuffs of his black shirt, the dark tattoos shifting as his muscles bunched with furious adrenaline.
Anna did not look back.
Her stride remained measured, elegant, and perfectly detached. She moved with the calm, rhythmic poise of an empress traversing her own gallery, her silver clutch held lightly against her ribs, her red train whispering softly against the cold, mirror-finished marble floor. She glided past a group of junior state senators who stepped back to let her pass, her eyes fixed entirely on the arched doorway leading toward the glass-enclosed winter garden at the rear of the pavilion.
Vincent closed the distance between them with terrifying speed.
Ten yards. Six yards. Four yards.
He could smell her. Through the thick haze of floral arrangements, champagne, and women’s perfumes, his senses locked onto an impossible, agonizingly familiar fragrance: Bulgarian rose, bergamot, and the faint, sweet warmth of almond blossom. It was the bespoke perfume he had commissioned for her from an apothecary in Florence on their second anniversary. It was a scent that had haunted his pillows for a thousand nights, a scent that had driven him to empty bottles of bourbon in his empty Lake Forest mansion just to blot it from his memory.
“Anna!”
His voice tore through the polite ambient hum of the waltz like a gunshot in a crowded church. The conversation around them died instantly. A nearby alderman choked on his scotch; three women in satin gowns turned their heads in shock, their eyes wide as they saw the legendary Vincent Moretti openly shouting across a public ballroom.
The woman in the red gown did not flinch. She did not stumble. She did not miss half a step. She continued forward, passing beneath the gilded archway into the grand gallery that connected the ballroom to the conservatory.
Vincent surged through the opening between the two towering floral pedestals, his shoulder violently clipping an urn of white calla lilies. The heavy ceramic vase wobbled dangerously, showering water and bruised petals across the white marble, but Vincent didn’t even glance at the destruction.
He was three paces behind her now. He could see the intricate twists of her golden-blonde braids, the tiny diamond pins woven into the hair, the soft indentation of her spine where the red silk dipped low against her back.
His voice dropped from a command to a ragged, bleeding plea that cracked in the center of his chest.
“I held your funeral three years ago.”
May you like
The words were spoken into the warm air right behind her ear, heavy with three years of cemetery dirt, empty caskets, and silent tears shed in the dark.
Anna kept walking.
