Chapter 4 - The Poisoned Treaty of Lake PontchartrainThe silence that followed was heavier than the swamp fog rolling off the bayou.
Luca did not curse. He did not slam the cypress lid. He gently ran his thumb over his father’s handwriting on the first page of the journal.
“If you are reading this, Luca, then I am dead, and the viper that shared my table has struck. Marco Bellini offered to fund our defense against the Falcone family, but Samuel Reed intercepted a courier carrying Bellini’s private wire coordinates to our coordinates in Houma...”
Luca closed the book with a quiet thud.
Behind us on the gravel path, the door of the second SUV opened. Two guards dragged Vanessa Bellini out into the rain.
Her ivory lace dress was soaked through, covered in black river mud, her elaborate hairstyle ruined by the wind. She looked at the open cypress box on the dock, and whatever arrogance remained in her eyes vanished, replaced by sheer, primal terror.
“Luca... please,” she sobbed, falling to her knees in the gravel. “My father... my father was young back then! It was a different era! The syndicates were killing each other across the entire delta! You can’t hold our generation responsible for thirty-year-old blood!”
Luca walked slowly toward her. His heavy boots made no sound against the wet sand.
He stopped two paces away, towering over the shaking woman like an executioner on a scaffold.
“Your father murdered an innocent man who gave my family shelter,” Luca said, his voice flat, devoid of rage, carrying only cold, mathematical finality. “He took this land, built his docks on Samuel Reed’s ashes, and then offered his daughter to me as an alliance to ensure no one ever audited his river permits.”
“I didn’t know about the murder!” Vanessa cried out, tears streaming down her pale cheeks. “I swear to God, Luca, I thought the Reed family had just moved to Texas! My father never told me about a fire!”
“You knew,” I said, stepping off the wooden dock until I stood beside Luca.
Vanessa glared at me with raw, venomous hatred. “You shut your mouth, you filthy little dishwasher!”
“Two weeks ago,” I said, looking down at her calmly, “I was clearing the private salon after your father’s birthday dinner. I found a shredded folder in the study wastebasket. It was an environmental survey of this very parcel of land. Your father was preparing to sell these three hundred acres to a petrochemical conglomerate for sixty million dollars.”
Vanessa went completely translucent.
“You wanted me blacklisted from this city tonight not because the roast was rustic, Vanessa,” I continued. “You wanted me gone because you realized my last name was Reed. You recognized my face from the family portraits your father kept in his land deed archives.”
Luca’s obsidian eyes narrowed into razor-sharp slits.
He reached down, took Vanessa by the chin with his gloved hand, and forced her face upward into the rain.
“Is that true, Vanessa?” Luca whispered.
She couldn’t speak. She could only tremble, her teeth chattering violently in the freezing December mist.
Luca let go of her chin with an expression of pure disgust.
“Dante,” Luca commanded.
“Boss?”
“Take Miss Bellini to the safehouse beneath the St. Charles warehouse. Strip her of her phones, her jewelry, and her access cards.”
“And Marco Bellini?” Dante asked, his hand tightening on his weapon.
“My father spent fifty years believing Marco was his brother in arms,” Luca replied, looking out over the dark water of the bayou. “Call a full meeting of the Gulf Coast Council for sunrise at the St. Louis Cathedral square. Every river baron from Mobile to Galveston will be present.”
May you like
He turned to me, his gaze softening by an imperceptible fraction.
“Come, Nora. You’re done wearing a maid’s uniform.”
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