Chapter 3 - The Locket and the Screen
It was a bitter Thursday night in mid-February when the sky finally broke open, pouring a mixture of freezing rain and slush across the pavement.
In his thirty-first-floor study, Enzo sat across from Rocco, his underboss and oldest friend. A stack of financial ledgers lay open between them, detailing the shipping manifest losses from the southern docks.
"The Salerno family is pushing harder on the railyard territory," Rocco said, lighting a cigarette and tossing the match into an glass tray. "Vittoria's father thinks because his daughter is sleeping in your bed, he owns half our lakefront routes. He's pressing for a wedding date, Don Enzo."
Enzo didn't answer. He was staring out the floor-to-ceiling glass at the black ribbon of the Chicago River far below. "Tell Salerno the wedding is postponed."
Rocco groaned, rubbing his temples. "Enzo, come on. You can't keep pushing him off. The engagement was the only thing that stopped a full-scale turf war last summer. Vittoria is furious. She's been screaming at the staff all week because you haven't touched her in a month."
"I don't care about Vittoria," Enzo said coldly.
He reached into his tailored coat, pulled out the silver swallow locket, and set it on the polished walnut desk between them.
Rocco stared at the little piece of cheap jewelry with absolute disbelief. "You're still obsessed with that ghost? Enzo, it was one night. A masked server who probably saw an opportunity to sleep with a billionaire. She's gone. She took whatever money she wanted from your wallet and disappeared."
"She didn't take a dime from my wallet," Enzo snapped, his voice dropping into a register that made the room's temperature plummet. "My wallet was on the side table, wide open. Three thousand in cash. She didn't touch it. She didn't leave a note. She didn't ask for a favor. She just left."
He stood up, pacing toward the corner of the room where an old, archived security terminal rested on a low credenza.
"I checked the main ballroom cameras a hundred times," Enzo muttered, his fingers flying across the terminal's mechanical keyboard. "The power surge wiped the main feeds. But three weeks ago, I had my tech guys pull the secondary backup drive from the service elevators."
Rocco stood up, stepping closer. "And?"
"The service elevator camera was on a separate circuit," Enzo said. He cued up the grainy, black-and-white footage stamped with the date: October 24, 04:12 AM.
On the screen, a woman in a backless black dress and a gold filigree mask stepped into the narrow metal elevator. She was clutching her dress together over her chest, her hair slightly disheveled, her shoulders shaking with quiet, rapid breaths.
"Look at her neck," Enzo commanded, pointing his finger at the screen.
Rocco leaned in. Hung around the masked woman's neck was a thin silver chain. At the end of the chain hung a tiny silver swallow locket—the exact twin of the one sitting on the walnut desk.
"She took it off when she left the library," Enzo whispered, his heart beginning to hammer against his ribs like a trapped beast. "It broke off her chain while she was on the sofa, and she didn't even notice it was gone."
"Okay," Rocco said, his tone turning serious. "So she went down the service elevator. Where did she go?"
Enzo hit the fast-forward button. The camera feed jumped forward twenty minutes.
At 04:35 AM, the service elevator doors opened again at the basement level.
A woman stepped out. But she wasn't wearing the black server dress or the gold mask anymore. She was wearing a simple, faded gray maid's uniform, her dark hair pinned back into a neat, modest braid.
As she stepped out beneath the bright fluorescent tube light of the basement hallway, she reached up to adjust the collar of her gray dress.
The camera caught her face in full, high-definition focus for three long seconds.
Soft, expressive almond eyes. A delicate jawline. A small, pale face that looked exhausted, beautiful, and desperately quiet.
Around her neck, where the silver chain had been twenty minutes earlier, was a faint red scratch where the locket had been violently ripped away during their passionate, blind encounter in the dark library.
Enzo froze. The breath rushed completely out of his lungs as if he had been struck in the chest with a sledgehammer.
"No..." he breathed, his voice cracking. "No, no, no..."
Rocco frowned, staring at the screen. "Wait... I know her. That's... that's the maid. The one who spilled the scotch in your office back in November."
Enzo dropped his hands to the edge of the desk, his knuckles turning pure white as he stared at the screen.
Memory after memory slammed into his brain with blinding, agonizing clarity:
The girl kneeling on the Persian rug, shivering in terror. The way her voice had trembled when she begged him for her job: 'I've just been feeling unwell...' The way her hand had pressed protectively against her lower stomach. Vittoria laughing as she insulted her. And himself—standing over her like a monster, dropping a few hundred-dollar bills onto the floor and telling her she was a liability.
"Nora..." Enzo whispered, the name tearing out of his throat like a jagged shard of glass. "Her name was Nora Reyes."
He looked down at his own hands—the hands that had held her so tenderly in the dark library, and then thrown money at her face four weeks later while she cried on her knees.
"Enzo?" Rocco asked, stepped back as he saw the terrifying, unhinged look forming in his boss's eyes. "Enzo, what's wrong with you?"
"I fired her," Enzo said, his voice dropping into a whisper that sounded like death itself. "She came to my office four weeks after that night... she was sick, she was pale, she was terrified... and I threw her out into the street."
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He turned on Rocco with a speed that made the underboss reach instinctively for his shoulder holster.
"Rocco," Enzo roared, grabbing his lieutenant by the lapels of his leather coat. "The maid. Nora Reyes. Find her. Find her right now. Call every hospital, every landlord, every payroll registry in this Godforsaken city! If she isn't in front of me before the sun comes up, I will burn Chicago to the ground!"
