Chapter 1 - The Stolen Signet of Boardwalk“My father was buried wearing this.”
Serena froze mid-breath.
My heavy palm rested flat over the battered velvet ring box on the baize-covered card table.
Across the private salon, Maya backed against the walnut wainscoting, knotting the edges of her stained serving apron in her fists as though the heavy gold band might suddenly reappear in her pocket.
I looked at Serena.
“Try that story one more time.”
Her lips parted, dry and bloodless.
Not a single syllable.
Good.
I had personally slid that twenty-two-karat signet ring—carved with the screaming falcon of the Moretti dynasty—onto my father Carmine’s swollen right index finger eight years ago inside the funeral parlor on Atlantic Avenue.
Not a mortician.
Not an embalmer.
Not an associate.
Me.
He had demanded it forty-eight hours before the cancer stopped his heart.
Very specifically.
“Bury the falcon with me, Dante. The seal never leaves the grave unless the bloodline is broken.”
I had watched the heavy reinforced steel vault roll into the wall of the private mausoleum. I had personally locked the brass cylinder and thrown the only key into twenty fathoms of saltwater off Absecon Inlet.
So either the stone vault had dissolved on its own—
or someone had taken a welding torch to my father's coffin.
“Who handed you the box, Serena?”
Serena’s throat bobbed as she tried to force a swallow.
“I found it.”
“Where?”
“In the floor safe behind the executive suite bar.”
Wrong.
That safe had been emptied and decommissioned the night of the funeral. I had the combination altered and the locking bolts welded shut five years ago.
The ring had never crossed that threshold.
Maya spoke from the shadows near the service sideboard, her voice thin but sharp with terror:
“She didn't get that box from any safe, Mr. Moretti. She brought it up through the freight elevator from the shoreline foundation tunnel.”
Serena snapped her head around, her diamonds catching the chandelier glare.
“Silence yourself, you thieving rat!”
Too loud. Too terrified.
There.
I stepped across the parquet, placing my broad frame directly between Serena and the terrified server.
“When did you see her, Maya?”
“Three o'clock this afternoon, sir.”
Maya’s breath came in jagged, shallow gasps.
“I was bringing down clean bar towels to the basement laundry. The service elevator door opened, and Miss Serena walked out. Her satin shoes were soaked with muddy marsh water, and she was carrying that velvet box in a plastic specimen bag.”
“Was she alone?”
“No, sir. The night security foreman was behind her, holding a battery-powered masonry drill.”
Serena’s face turned into an ugly snarl of hysterical rage:
“She’s inventing lies! She’s an hourly banquet temp who stole the ring from the master bedroom dressing table while the cleaning crew was on break!”
Maya backed hard against the wall, but her eyes held mine.
“She saw me by the laundry bins,” Maya whispered.
“What did she say, Maya?”
“She asked if I liked working here.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said I needed the wages for my mother's rent.”
“And tonight?”
Maya looked down at the velvet box on the green baize.
“She cornered me near the banquet pantry right before the third course was served. She shoved the box into the pocket of my uniform and told me that if I opened my mouth, she’d have her father’s security team swear they saw me take it.”
My jaw tightened until my knuckles turned white against the card table.
“Then she made a scene,” Maya said, tears finally breaking past her lashes. “She grabbed my arm, pulled the ring out in front of the gaming commissioners, and told everyone she’d caught me red-handed.”
Exactly as I had watched it unfold from the security monitor above the bar.
A theatrical arrest performed for an audience of regulators and syndicate captains.
A manufactured thief designed to justify why the long-buried seal of Don Carmine Moretti was suddenly back in circulation.
I looked down into Serena’s pale, sweat-slicked face.
“You didn't expose Maya because you cared about a stolen heirloom.”
My voice dropped into an octave of lethal, subterranean stillness.
“You needed an official police inventory. You needed the city police to log that ring into evidence so your father could use the wax impression to authorize the transfer of the offshore bank shares tomorrow morning.”
The arrogance drained from Serena’s features, leaving behind the hollow, twitching terror of an exposed conspirator.
She leaned forward, her voice a desperate, ragged whisper:
May you like
“You don’t understand whose corpse that ring came off of, Dante.”
Interesting.
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