Chapter 2 - The Falcon’s Thread
The silence inside the studio hung heavy after Victor’s laughter faded.
He stood on the opposite side of the maple cutting table, his large hands resting lightly on the smooth wood. Up close, without the immediate chaos of blood and gunfire, he was even more imposing. His presence filled the room, heavy and suffocating.
"Seven," Victor repeated, his voice low. "Two in charcoal, two in navy, three in black. I have meetings in New York next week. I cannot attend boardroom negotiations looking like a casualty."
I kept my hands firmly folded in my lap, my thumb pressing through the fabric of my blouse to feel the sharp edge of the silver falcon pendant hidden against my sternum.
"I don't have enough of your mother's silk," I said, keeping my voice even, professional, and devoid of the terror clawing at my throat. "There was only one square. I used half of it on the gray shirt you're wearing right now."
Victor reached into his trousers pocket, pulled out a flat, velvet-lined box, and set it on the table between us. He flipped the latch open with his thumb.
Inside lay three more folded squares of the exact same pale blue floral silk.
I stared at the fabric. "Where did you get these?"
"My mother left behind a trunk," Victor replied, his dark eyes fixed on mine. "Curtains, dresses, table linens. She brought them from Sicily in 1994. My father threw most of it into the river after she died. I saved what I could."
He leaned in slightly, his sharp jawline tightening.
"You said fabric is meant to protect people," he murmured. "So use it."
I looked at the blue silk, then looked back up into the face of the man who had murdered my real father.
I remembered the night of my sixth birthday. I remembered the screaming, the smell of burning gasoline, and the sight of men in black coats breaking through the wrought-iron gates of our estate in Chestnut Hill. My mother had shoved me into a narrow priest hole behind the library bookshelf, pressing her palm over my mouth while the sound of gunfire tore through the house.
Through the crack in the wood, I had seen a teenage boy standing beside an older, cruel-faced man. The boy had dark, wild eyes and scars on his arms. The older man was Marcus Sabatini—Victor's father.
“Kill every Moretti,” Marcus had ordered. “Leave no roots to grow back.”
I had survived because my mother hid me, and because a low-level guard took pity on a orphaned six-year-old girl and dumped me at a fire station three towns over with nothing in my pocket except the silver falcon pendant my father had placed around my neck before he went out to die.
I had spent eighteen years in the foster system under the name Tessa Quinn, slowly forgetting the faces of my brothers, my mother, and my father—but never forgetting the name Sabatini.
Now, the son of the man who destroyed my bloodline was asking me to sew his clothes.
"I need measuring tape," I said, my voice hardening. "If I'm going to make custom shirts from scratch, I need exact measurements. Upper chest, shoulder slope, sleeve length, and the exact radius of your scar tissue."
Victor didn't blink. "Measure me."
He unbuttoned the gray cashmere shirt I had sewn the night before. Slowly, he slid the sleeves down his arms, exposing his broad chest and the angry, violent red map of burns across his back.
The knife wound beneath his ribs was covered in clean white surgical dressing. The skin around it was bruised purple, but the inflammation had noticeably decreased since yesterday.
I stood up from my stool, picked up a yellow vinyl measuring tape from the cutting drawer, and stepped around the table.
My heart was hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. If I touched him wrong, if my shirt shifted, if the silver chain around my neck slipped out from under my collar—
"You're nervous," Victor observed quietly, his eyes following my movement.
"I'm standing next to a man who controls half the East Coast organized crime network," I replied dryly, keeping my distance as I raised the tape. "I'd be insane not to be nervous."
"You weren't nervous last night when you put a pair of shears through my mother's silk while Rocco had a gun pointed at your skull."
"That was adrenaline," I said, reaching up to drape the yellow tape across his wide shoulders. "This is basic survival instinct."
I brought the tape around his chest. To measure accurately, I had to step in close—so close that my breast brushed against his arm. I could feel the intense heat radiating from his skin. The scent of him—rich leather, cedarwood, and blood—filled my senses.
I pulled the tape snug across his chest. "Forty-six inches."
"You have precise hands," Victor said. His head turned slightly, his breath warm against the side of my neck. "Where did you learn to sew like this? Lombardi didn't teach you. He was a cobbler's son who learned to hem pants in prison."
My fingers tightened on the measuring tape.
"My mother," I lied smoothly. "She was a seamstress. She taught me before she passed away."
"What was her name?"
"Elena," I said, using the first fake name that came to mind. "Elena Quinn."
Victor was silent for a moment. His eyes drifted down to my collarbone, where the top button of my denim blouse was fastened tight to keep my pendant hidden.
"You wear your shirt buttoned high," he noted, his voice dropping into a dangerous, dark register. "Even in a room with the heat running."
"I like my privacy, Mr. Sabatini," I replied, pulling the tape down to measure his arm length from the acromion process to his wrist. "Thirty-five inches on the sleeve."
"Privacy is a luxury people in this house don't possess, Miss Quinn," Victor said quietly.
Before I could step back, the studio door opened with a sudden, heavy thud.
Rocco stepped inside, holding a thick leather folder under his arm. His face was grim, his eyes darting immediately to me standing in close proximity to Victor.
"Boss," Rocco said, his voice tense. "We have a problem in South Philly."
Victor didn't turn around immediately. He kept his eyes on me for two seconds longer before slowly buttoning his shirt back up. "What kind of problem?"
"The Moretti properties," Rocco said, dropping the folder onto the cutting table. "The old warehouses near the navy yard that we seized five years ago? Someone set fire to warehouse four an hour ago. And they left a mark on the alley wall."
My chest seized. My breath caught in my throat.
Victor turned slowly toward Rocco. "What mark?"
Rocco reached into the folder, pulled out a glossy eight-by-ten crime scene photograph, and laid it face up on the table.
In bright red spray paint across the blackened brick wall was a crude, jagged drawing of a bird with spread wings.
A falcon.
Victor stared at the photograph, his expression darkening until his face resembled carved marble.
"The Morettis are dead," Victor said softly, the words dropping like lead weights onto the floor. "My father killed every single one of them in 2006."
"That's what we thought," Rocco said grimly. "But whoever burned warehouse four used military-grade thermite. The same stuff Don Eduardo Moretti's hit squads used back in the ninety's."
May you like
Rocco's eyes drifted slowly away from the photograph and locked directly onto me.
"And there's something else, boss," Rocco added, his voice dripping with poison. "I ran a background trace on Lombardi's records this morning. Tessa Quinn doesn't exist before 2008. Her social security number was generated by a state orphanage in Scranton when she was six years old."
