Chapter 4 - THE SEVEN-MINUTE CODE
The dining room remained dead quiet, the fourteen guests sitting like stone statues as they watched their feared leader engage in a culinary interrogation with a woman who had been clearing their empty dirty plates twenty minutes prior.
"Tell me how to fix it," Carmine said softly, his dark eyes fixed on her face.
Nell didn't flinch. She gestured toward the plate with a subtle, elegant motion of her right gloved hand—a gesture that belonged in an upscale kitchen in Paris, not a servant’s quarters.
"You don't just melt the butter," Nell explained, her tone even and precise. "You brown it first to bring out the nutty profile. You toast the pecans in a dry skillet with a pinch of coarse sea salt before they ever touch the filling."
Carmine listened, his gaze never leaving her lips. "And the syrup?"
"You don't bring it to a rolling boil," Nell answered smoothly. "You heat dark cane syrup with a splash of bourbon just until the sugar crystals dissolve completely. Then you take it off the flame and cool it."
Carmine tilted his head slightly. "For how long?"
"Cool it exactly seven minutes," Nell said without a second's hesitation. "Six minutes and the butter separates when baked. Eight minutes and the mixture thickens too fast, trapping air bubbles that ruin the texture."
The moment those words left her mouth, Carmine’s left hand—which had been loosely resting near his wine glass—slowly spread flat against the white tablecloth. His fingers splayed wide, pressing firmly down into the linen.
It was not a random movement. It was a subtle, coded hand signal used by the Orsini family for generations to signal immediate, high-priority interest or silent danger.
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Standing thirty feet away by the grand double doors of the dining hall, Benny Santino caught the movement instantly.
At thirty-five, Benny was Carmine’s most trusted lieutenant and head of personal security—a sharp, dark-suited man with a broken nose and eyes that never stopped tracking threats. Benny’s posture shifted from relaxed vigilance to absolute, razor-sharp alertness. His hand drifted two inches closer to the left lapel of his jacket as his eyes locked onto the back of the housemaid’s neck.
