Chapter 2 - The Flour and the Fallen Kingdom
The kitchen of the Russo estate was a sprawling, twenty-foot-high cathedral of industrial stainless steel, white subway tile, and dark butcher-block islands. Designed for high-end catering and formal dinners, it was usually kept in an immaculate, sterile condition that rivaled a surgical suite—every copper pan hung at an exact forty-five-degree angle, every surface wiped down with odorless sanitizers.
Today, the room looked as though a confectionery blizzard had detonated in the center of the floor.
A fifty-pound commercial sack of unbleached pastry flour had been tipped onto its side near the central prep island. A wide, uneven drift of white powder coated six yards of dark gray slate floor tiles, swirling around overturned plastic mixing bowls, wooden spoons, and half-rolled balls of butter cookie dough. In the corner, beside an abandoned rolling pin, sat three miniature pastel-colored aprons discarded like battle flags.
Sitting dead-center in the deepest drift of flour was the young maid.
She was in her mid-twenties, slender, with warm chestnut hair that had completely escaped its pins to tumble in disheveled, flour-dusted waves around her shoulders. Her standard gray-and-white domestic uniform was thoroughly ruined; the bib of her white apron was smeared with butter and vanilla paste, and her dark stockings were caked with white powder up to her knees. Her cheeks were flushed bright pink from laughter, a smudge of white flour streaked across the bridge of her small, straight nose like a stripe of war paint.
Climbing over her back with unbridled, squealing ferocity was Mia.
At four years old, Mia was the rebel of the triplets, her long brown curls tied in lopsided pigtails, her pastel-yellow dress covered in white handprints as she used the young woman's shoulders as a climbing frame, roaring with high-pitched toddler triumph. Beside her, clutching the maid's left arm with both hands and burying her giggling face into the gray cotton of the uniform, was Valentina, her matching pastel-pink dress trailing through the flour, her hazel eyes bright with an intoxicating, wild happiness that Dominic had feared was permanently dead.
And standing two feet away, leaning her small hip against the edge of the low pastry table, was Lucia.
Lucia was the eldest by six minutes. Her hair was darker than her sisters', falling in long, thick ringlets past her shoulder blades, framing a porcelain-pale face that had remained an unreadable, tragic mask for four hundred and twenty days. She wore a delicate pastel-blue dress with scalloped lace along the hem.
Lucia was not screaming, but she was watching.
Her small, usually clenched hands were resting flat on her knees. Her hazel eyes—the exact shade, shape, and depth of Isabella’s—were wide, sparkling under the overhead halogens. And across her small, silent lips, a genuine, undeniable smile was curving upward, soft and brilliant as the dawn.
The young maid fell dramatically onto her side in the flour, her hands raised in mock surrender as Mia tumbled into her lap.
"I yield!" the maid laughed, her voice rich, musical, and completely unbothered by the mess. "The brave princesses have conquered the kitchen! The cookies belong to the crown!"
Dominic reached the open doorway.
His boots halted on the brass transition strip separating the hardwood from the slate. His hand remained hooked inside his jacket, his fingers locked around his weapon, his towering six-foot-two frame filling the threshold like a storm cloud that had blocked out the sun.
The sudden, catastrophic shift in the room's atmospheric pressure was instantaneous.
The warmth, the scent of melting butter and sugar, the bright, innocent chaos—all of it seemed to hit an invisible wall and shatter.
Lucia’s smile died.
The little girl didn't look at the maid; she didn't look at her sisters. Her eyes snapped toward the doorway, her gaze locking onto the massive, dark silhouette of her father. The light in her hazel eyes vanished, replaced by an immediate, petrified stillness that made her small shoulders curl inward toward her ribs.
Valentina stopped laughing mid-gasp, her small hands slipping from the maid’s arm as she scrambled backward into the flour, her knees knocking against a dropped wooden spoon. Mia frozen on the maid’s lap, her tiny fingers tangling into the fabric of the gray uniform, her chin dropping toward her chest.
The young maid turned her head, following the children's terrified stares.
She saw the tailored black suit. She saw the open collar, the black thorned cross climbing his neck, the broad chest, and the pale, glacial gray eyes looking down at her as if she were a rat that had crawled into an altar room.
The laughter in the kitchen was snuffed out like a match dropped in water.
May you like
Dominic did not step onto the flour. He stood immovable, his voice dropping into a low, terrifying register that made the copper pans hanging from the ceiling vibrate faintly:
"Who are you?"
