Chapter 1 - EIGHTEEN MINUTES LATE
Nobody lasted six weeks inside Luca Moretti’s mansion.
That was the first thing I learned about the job.
The second thing I learned was that showing up eighteen minutes late to an interview with Luca Moretti was apparently considered a form of assisted suicide.
The security guard at the front gate looked at his watch, looked at me, and then looked back at his watch as though hoping time itself might have made a clerical error.
“You’re here for the maid position?”
“I was supposed to be.”
“You’re eighteen minutes late.”
“I’m painfully aware.”
Chicago rain streamed from the ends of my hair. My umbrella had surrendered somewhere near Wacker Drive, my coffee cup was leaking down one hand, and the heel of my right shoe had developed a squeak that sounded like a distressed mouse.
The guard lowered his voice.
“Mr. Moretti doesn’t tolerate lateness.”
I looked past him toward the enormous black mansion standing behind iron gates.
“Does he tolerate women trapped behind garbage trucks who lose umbrellas to eighty-mile-an-hour wind and spend six minutes fighting a parking meter?”
The guard stared.
“I don’t think anyone’s ever asked him.”
“Excellent. Maybe originality will keep me alive.”
His name was Frank.
I knew because it was embroidered discreetly beneath the insignia on his security jacket.
Frank looked like a man who had watched plenty of people enter Luca Moretti’s world and regret the decision.
He pressed the intercom.
“Mr. Moretti, the applicant is here.”
A deep male voice answered almost immediately.
“She’s eighteen minutes late.”
Before common sense could reach my mouth, I leaned toward the speaker.
“Seventeen if we round responsibly.”
Frank slowly turned his head toward me.
His expression suggested he was reconsidering whether allowing me through the gate would qualify as negligence.
Silence came from the intercom.
Five seconds.
Ten.
Then the voice returned.
“Send her in.”
The gates opened.
I followed Frank up a stone driveway wide enough to land a small aircraft.
The Moretti mansion overlooked Lake Michigan from one of those Chicago neighborhoods where houses didn’t have prices so much as financial eligibility requirements.
Black stone.
Floor-to-ceiling windows.
Iron balconies.
Security cameras almost invisible beneath the architecture.
Nothing about it screamed wealth.
It whispered it.
Which somehow made it more intimidating.
Frank opened the front door.
The interior was marble, dark wood, antique brass, expensive artwork, armed security, and suffocating silence.
Nothing felt lived in.
Everything felt controlled.
I had taken three steps across the foyer when a severe-looking woman in her sixties appeared.
“Claire Bennett?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Margaret Bell. Household manager.”
She examined me from wet hair to squeaking shoe.
“You’re late.”
“I’ve been informed.”
“This position has rules.”
“I assumed.”
“You do not enter private offices unless requested. You do not touch locked cabinets. You do not ask questions about guests. You do not repeat anything you hear.”
“That sounds reasonable.”
“You do not wander into the west wing.”
I paused.
“The west wing?”
Her expression hardened.
“You do not enter it.”
“Got it.”
“And you never interrupt Mr. Moretti when his office doors are closed.”
I followed her down a hallway.
“How long did the last maid last?”
Margaret stopped.
“Eleven days.”
“The one before her?”
“Twenty-three.”
“The one before that?”
“Four.”
“Days?”
“Hours.”
I blinked.
“What happened?”
“She cried.”
“And?”
“She continued crying.”
Margaret resumed walking.
That was when I began wondering whether the salary listed in the advertisement contained hazard pay.
She stopped outside a pair of black double doors.
“Mr. Moretti is waiting.”
I inhaled.
Then walked inside.
And saw Luca Moretti.
He sat behind an enormous desk with the Chicago skyline rising through the windows behind him.
He was thirty-nine, according to the research I absolutely had not spent two hours doing the previous evening.
Dark wavy hair.
Sharp features.
Broad shoulders.
Black tailored suit.
Open collar.
Ink disappearing beneath one sleeve and climbing above the other.
There were men who tried to look dangerous.
Luca didn’t.
That was probably why he was.
Stories about him floated around Chicago in lowered voices.
That Luca Moretti could remember every debt ever owed to him.
Every betrayal.
Every license plate.
Every promise.
Apparently he remembered tardy maids too.
I stepped into the office.
My résumé caught against the brass door handle.
The folder opened.
Twenty-three carefully printed pages exploded across his immaculate marble floor.
One slid directly underneath his polished black shoe.
I stared at it.
Then him.
“Well,” I said, “at least we’ve established I wasn’t hired for elegance.”
He didn’t smile.
“You’re late.”
“Yes.”
“No excuse?”
“Several. None will make me less late.”
Something flickered behind his eyes.
I crouched and began collecting pages.
I could feel him watching me.
Most people probably apologized until he became bored.
I had already apologized to myself approximately forty times between downtown and his front gate.
Another apology wasn’t going to change traffic.
When I stood, my résumé was upside down.
Luca picked up the page beside his shoe.
“University of Illinois Chicago.”
“Two years.”
“You never graduated.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“My mother had a stroke.”
His gaze lifted.
I hadn’t planned to tell him.
But lying to Luca Moretti seemed unwise.
“She was fifty-seven. My father left when I was thirteen, so there was nobody else. I went home to Rockford.”
“And afterward?”
“I worked.”
“As a maid?”
“As whatever paid.”
His eyebrow moved slightly.
“Cleaning. Cooking. Property maintenance. Bookkeeping. Scheduling repairs. Negotiating with contractors. Fighting insurance companies. And convincing an eighty-year-old woman named Doris to take heart medication while she threatened me with a slipper.”
Something happened to Luca Moretti’s mouth.
Not quite a smile.
But dangerously close.
“You believe that qualifies you to manage this house?”
“No.”
His eyes sharpened.
I continued.
“I believe managing everything else qualifies me to learn.”
He placed my résumé on his desk.
“You don’t seem nervous.”
“I am.”
“You don’t look nervous.”
“My mother taught me panic is more useful after the problem is solved.”
Silence.
Then Luca leaned back.
“Everyone who comes into this house is afraid eventually.”
“I’ve noticed your employee retention strategy could use work.”
This time I definitely saw it.
A smile.
Half a second.
Gone immediately.
He stood.
That changed the room.
He was taller than I expected.
He walked to the windows.
Chicago stretched beneath us, gray beneath the storm.
“Why would a woman like you want to work here?”
“The salary.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I hesitated.
His reflection watched mine in the glass.
“Why,” Luca repeated, “would you voluntarily enter the house of a man everyone else is desperate to escape?”
My mouth went dry.
This wasn’t about housekeeping.
He wasn’t asking whether I could clean marble.
He was asking whether I was afraid of him.
I looked at Luca Moretti.
Then I remembered hospital bills.
My mother learning to walk again.
Collection notices.
Working double shifts.
Eating vending-machine crackers at midnight because groceries had become mathematics.
Fear had never paid any of those bills.
So I answered.
“Because fear is expensive.”
He turned.
I swallowed.
“When you’re broke long enough, Mr. Moretti, you stop asking whether something scares you. You ask whether you can survive it.”
For the first time since I entered that mansion, Luca said nothing.
Not intimidating silence.
Actual silence.
I continued quietly.
“My mother needed me when I was twenty. I was terrified every day. I still got up. So whatever people say about you, whatever happened to the women who worked here before me…”
I lifted one shoulder.
“You’re not the scariest thing I’ve survived.”
The room became very still.
Luca’s gaze stayed on me.
I wondered whether I had just talked myself out of the best salary I had ever been offered.
Finally, he returned to the desk.
He picked up a pen.
“Six weeks.”
I blinked.
“What?”
“Probation.”
“You’re hiring me?”
“If you’re late again, you’re fired.”
Relief hit so quickly I nearly laughed.
Instead I nodded.
“Understood.”
He signed something.
Then stopped.
“There’s one more rule.”
“Margaret already gave me approximately seventeen.”
“This one comes from me.”
His eyes met mine.
“Don’t go looking for secrets in this house.”
I should have simply nodded.
Instead I asked the worst possible question.
“What if the secrets come looking for me?”
Luca stared.
And somewhere outside the office, something heavy crashed.
A man shouted.
Footsteps thundered down the hallway.
Luca’s expression changed instantly.
Whatever humor had existed vanished.
He opened the door.
Frank appeared.
“Sir.”
“What happened?”
Frank’s eyes moved briefly toward me.
Then back to Luca.
“We found someone inside the west wing.”
The words seemed to drain every degree of warmth from the room.
Luca walked out.
Then stopped.
He looked back at me.
“Claire.”
“Yes?”
“You start Monday.”
He paused.
“And whatever you heard just now…”
“I heard nothing.”
His gaze lingered.
“Good answer.”
Then he disappeared down the hallway.
I stood alone in the office, holding my crooked résumé against my chest.
I should have felt lucky.
Instead I found myself staring toward the corridor Luca had vanished into.
Toward the west wing.
The one place Margaret had specifically warned me never to enter.
I had been inside Luca Moretti’s mansion for less than twenty minutes.
And already someone had broken the most important rule in the house.
I would eventually learn who that person was.
May you like
But what frightened me wasn’t discovering why they had entered the west wing.
It was discovering that before my six-week probation ended, Luca Moretti would believe I had done exactly the same thing.
