Chapter 6 - WHY THE RESTAURANT WAS CALLED LAURA
I had never asked why the restaurant was called Laura.
Three months working there.
Hundreds of reservations.
Thousands of receipts.
One obvious question.
I assumed it was some Italian grandmother.
I was close.
Laura Bianchi Rossi was Dominic’s mother.
“She died when I was twenty-eight,” he told me.
“How?”
“Cancer.”
No mystery.
No shooting.
No mafia twist.
Cancer had taken a woman who apparently loved terrible paintings and cooked badly.
Dominic said it with surprising tenderness.
“My father named nothing after her.”
“So you did.”
“Yes.”
Then:
“She hated this life.”
That surprised me.
“Yet you stayed.”
His expression hardened.
“My father died when I was seventeen. There wasn’t much left to choose.”
I understood that sentence more than I wanted.
Then we studied the records.
Moretti had created consultant payments under Laura Bianchi’s old tax identity.
Dead people again.
Thomas Bennett.
Laura Bianchi.
Names nobody expected to answer questions.
The money totals were massive.
Moretti had been siphoning from both Varga and Rossi businesses for years.
Not enough in one place to trigger alarms.
Enough collectively to build something.
“What?” I asked.
Dominic’s financial investigators found the answer.
Real estate.
Warehouses.
A trucking company.
Three restaurants.
A private lending business.
Moretti was building his own independent network.
Varga thought he was loyal.
Dominic thought he was loyal.
Both were financing their future competitor.
Then came the most disturbing finding.
One Moretti-controlled company held the mortgage on my old apartment building.
I stared.
“He owned where we lived?”
“Indirectly.”
“How long?”
“Two years.”
Before Dad died.
Before Varga’s collectors came.
Before Dominic found us.
Moretti could monitor us whenever he wanted.
Maybe the apartment was never random.
Then a maintenance log surfaced.
Moretti’s company entered our apartment four times while I was at work.
“Why?”
I thought of my father’s papers.
The compass.
The ledger.
“He was looking.”
Dominic nodded.
Then:
“Your father knew.”
“How?”
“He moved the real evidence before the first entry.”
Sam’s compass.
I felt tears sting.
I had spent years believing Dad gambled away every protective instinct he possessed.
Maybe most.
Not all.
Then Dominic handed me something.
A bank record.
One month before Dad died, Thomas deposited $8,000 into a savings account.
Beneficiary:
Sam Bennett.
He had saved money?
“How?”
Dominic traced it.
Cash from selling his car.
Tools.
Watch.
Everything he owned of value.
My father had known he was dying.
He had been preparing Sam for life without him.
“He never told me.”
“Maybe he was ashamed.”
“That doesn’t fix anything.”
“No.”
Dominic looked at me.
“But truth does not have to fix the past to change how you understand it.”
I stared.
“Did you learn that from therapy?”
“No.”
“You should try it.”
His mouth twitched.
Then Paulie interrupted.
“Boss.”
“What?”
“Varga wants a meeting.”
Lucian Varga had learned Moretti was talking.
And apparently he wanted the original ledger badly enough to propose peace with Dominic Rossi.
May you like
There was only one condition.
He wanted Chloe Bennett at the table.
