Chapter 3 - The Uninvited Ex-Wife In The Pouring Rain And The Forged Restraining Order That Almost Broke A Little Boy's Heart
====================================================================
Benjamin's bedroom on the third floor had always been the warmest room in the Moretti mansion.
While the rest of the estate looked like an architectural museum—all cold Italian marble, dark mahogany, and priceless oil paintings—Benjamin's room was full of life.
Glow-in-the-dark constellations covered the high ceiling, meticulously pasted there by his mother three summers ago.
Model airplanes hung from fishing lines near the arched bay window.
And bookshelves lined the walls, crammed with encyclopedias about planets, dinosaurs, and LEGO sets he had built with his father on rainy Sunday afternoons.
Except when I pushed open his bedroom door at nine-thirty that night, the room looked like a crime scene.
I stopped dead on the threshold.
Beside me, Benjamin gasped, the blue balloon string slipping from his fingers.
The balloon floated upward, bumping gently against Saturn on the ceiling.
"My—my stuff," Benjamin whispered.
The bookshelves were completely bare.
The model airplanes had been yanked down from the ceiling, their plastic wings snapped and tossed into a heap in the corner next to three massive, heavy-duty gray shipping trunks.
Even the blue quilt Caroline had knitted for his seventh birthday had been stripped off the mattress, replaced with a sterile, plain white coverlet.
"Wait right here by the door, sweetheart," I said quickly, stepping in front of him so he wouldn't see the broken wings of his favorite B-17 bomber.
"Did Mrs. Carter do this?" Benjamin asked, his voice trembling all over again. "Daddy said they wouldn't pack until tomorrow..."
"Mrs. Carter didn't do this, honey," I said, my pulse throbbing in my throat.
Mrs. Carter had been in the kitchen preparing the engagement dinner since noon, and I had been steaming linens and setting the dining table since two.
Whoever had done this wasn't house staff.
I walked over to the nearest gray trunk and knelt beside it.
A commercial shipping label was already slapped across the lid: DHL International Express — Destination: Rolle, Switzerland.
Inside, Benjamin's sweaters and school uniforms had been shoved down carelessly on top of his textbooks.
"Where's Barnaby?" Benjamin asked suddenly, darting past me toward the bare mattress.
Barnaby was a worn, one-eared brown corduroy bear Benjamin had slept with since the night he was born—and more importantly, it was where he kept the little silver locket containing a photo of Luca and Caroline holding him at the hospital.
"And where's my scrapbook?!" Benjamin cried, dropping to his knees to look under the bed. "The one with Mommy's letters and my birthday cards! It was right on my nightstand!"
I opened the nightstand drawer.
Empty.
I checked the second gray trunk, then the third.
Nothing but clothes, shoes, and winter coats.
None of his toys, none of his family photographs, and none of the handmade cards from his mother were anywhere in those trunks.
"Let me check the walk-in closet, Ben," I said, trying to keep my voice steady.
I walked over to the white paneled door of his closet and turned the brass knob.
It didn't budge.
It was locked from the outside—and the vintage skeleton key that usually stayed in the keyhole was gone.
Just then, rapid footsteps echoed down the third-floor hallway, followed by the swish of heavy silk.
Vanessa appeared in the doorway, her red gown hiked up in one hand, breathing hard.
She hadn't stayed in the dining room with Luca; she must have slipped out through the butler's pantry the second Luca went to his study to call his lawyer.
When she saw me kneeling beside the open shipping trunks and Benjamin standing by the stripped bed, her eyes flashed with panic.
"Get out of this room, Rachel," she hissed, stepping inside and trying to pull the bedroom door shut behind her.
I stood up, placing myself squarely between her and Benjamin.
"Mr. Moretti told me to stay with Benjamin until he comes upstairs," I said.
"Luca is on a conference call in the west wing, and I am still the mistress of this house!" Vanessa snapped, marching toward the nightstand.
Actually, she wasn't looking at the nightstand.
She was looking at the locked closet door.
"What did you do with his things, Miss Bellini?" I asked quietly. "Mrs. Carter told Mr. Moretti you ordered the maids to pack tomorrow. Why is his room already stripped?"
"Because I hired professional movers from my decorator's agency while the staff was busy in the kitchen!" she spat, dropping all pretense now that there were no guests to impress. "If you want something done right in this house without ten nosy servants running to Luca, you have to pay outsiders to do it!"
Benjamin looked up at her, his small chest heaving.
"Where's Barnaby?" he asked, his voice barely a squeak. "And my scrapbook from Mommy?"
Vanessa didn't even look down at him.
"You're nine years old, Benjamin. You don't take tattered stuffed animals and babyish scrapbooks to an elite European academy. The boys there would eat you alive."
"Where are they?" I asked, my voice dropping an octave.
"In the trash chute where they belong," Vanessa said coldly, reaching into the hidden pocket of her red silk gown and pulling out a brass skeleton key. "Now move aside, Rachel. There are decorator blueprints in that closet that belong to me, and if you touch me, I'll have my father's bodyguards throw you into the street before Luca even hangs up the phone."
"The trash chute goes straight to the basement compactor," I whispered, horror washing over me. "The compactor runs automatically at ten o'clock on Friday nights."
I glanced at the grandfather clock in the hallway.
It was nine forty-two.
Benjamin let out a choked sob and ran toward the door, but Vanessa's arm shot out, grabbing him roughly by the shoulder of his navy suit jacket and yanking him back.
"You are not going anywhere, you little brat!" she snarled, her manicured nails digging into the wool of his jacket. "You have ruined my engagement dinner, humiliated my family in front of half of Chicago, and made your father look at me like a stranger! All over a fifty-cent balloon!"
"Don't touch him!" I lunged forward, grabbing Vanessa's wrist and prying her fingers off Benjamin's shoulder with a strength born of pure adrenaline.
Vanessa stumbled back a step into the shipping trunk, gasping in outrage.
"You just assaulted me!" she shrieked, clutching her wrist as if I had broken it. "You crazy, low-class bitch, you just put your hands on me!"
"I took your hands off a nine-year-old child," I breathed, pushing Benjamin behind my back. "And if you ever grab him like that again, losing my job will be the least of my worries."
Before Vanessa could scream again, a tall shadow fell across the bedroom doorway.
"What did you just call my son?"
Luca stood on the threshold.
He had taken off his suit jacket, his white dress shirt unbuttoned at the collar, the sleeves rolled up to his forearms.
His eyes moved slowly across the devastation of the room: the bare walls, the broken model airplanes in the corner, the three DHL shipping trunks with Swiss labels, the red mark on Vanessa's wrist, and Benjamin trembling behind my skirt.
Vanessa immediately dissolved into hysterics, holding up her arm.
"Luca! Thank God! Rachel just attacked me! I came up here to apologize to Benjamin and help unpack the trunks my decorator's assistant mistakenly packed this afternoon, and she grabbed my wrist and twisted it!"
Luca didn't even look at her wrist.
He walked past her as if she were a ghost, stopping in front of Benjamin.
"Ben," Luca said softly. "Did she grab you?"
Benjamin nodded, rubbing his left shoulder where the fabric of his small navy jacket was still crumpled.
"She said she threw Barnaby and Mommy's scrapbook down the trash chute," Benjamin sobbed. "Daddy, the compactor turns on at ten! Mommy's locket is inside Barnaby's pocket!"
Luca's gaze snapped toward me.
"Rachel, does the basement chute empty into the west maintenance room?"
"Yes, sir, right behind the boiler," I said immediately. "I have the service key on my ring."
"Take Marco from the bottom of the stairs and get it. Now."
I didn't wait to be told twice.
I bolted out of the bedroom, hiking up my uniform skirt as I flew down the back service stairs two at a time.
Marco was standing by the kitchen hallway, and one look at my face had him sprinting right behind me toward the basement door.
It was nine fifty-one when we burst into the concrete maintenance room beneath the garage.
The heavy steel compactor was already humming, its yellow warning light flashing as the hydraulic timer counted down the final nine minutes before the ten-o'clock crush cycle.
"Stand back," Marco growled, pulling a heavy iron crowbar from the tool rack on the wall.
I unlocked the side inspection hatch with trembling hands while Marco hit the red emergency stop button, slamming the crowbar into the latch to pop the heavy steel door open.
The smell of discarded flower stems and catering boxes from the engagement party hit us immediately.
There, buried beneath two black garbage bags of clipped white rose thorns and empty champagne cartons, was a clear plastic bin liner.
Marco reached in and hauled it out onto the concrete floor, ripping the plastic open.
I dropped to my knees.
Inside lay Barnaby the corduroy bear, his fur stained with spilled espresso grounds from the kitchen prep.
Beneath him was Benjamin's blue leather scrapbook—torn down the spine where someone had tried to rip it in half before shoving it down the narrow metal chute—along with seven years of framed photos of Benjamin and his mother, their glass fronts shattered into spiderwebs.
And at the very bottom of the bag was the blue quilt Caroline had knitted, soaked in red wine.
"Jesus Christ," Marco muttered under his breath, staring down at the ruined childhood memories of his boss's only child. "She didn't just clear the room. She tried to erase him."
I gently lifted Barnaby, brushing the coffee grounds off his little stitched nose, and checked the velcro pocket on his back.
The silver heart locket was still inside.
I clutched the bear and the torn scrapbook against my chest, while Marco gathered the rest of the bag.
When we got back up to the third floor, the bedroom door was wide open, and Mrs. Carter was standing in the hallway holding a tray with a towering two-tier chocolate fudge cake covered in nine glowing blue candles.
Inside the bedroom, Luca had used the brass skeleton key to unlock the walk-in closet.
Stacked inside the closet weren't Benjamin's toys.
They were rolls of imported French wallpaper, boxes of crystal nursery sconces, and a custom-ordered white lacquer crib still wrapped in plastic shipping film.
"You ordered a crib three weeks ago," Luca was saying, his voice terrifyingly calm as he stood by the open closet door. "You told the decorator to strip my son's walls while the staff was serving downstairs, and you threw his mother's photographs down a garbage chute."
"I wanted a fresh start for our family!" Vanessa wept from the floor where she had sunk onto her knees, her red silk dress pooled around her like spilled blood. "Every room in this house screams Caroline! Every time I walk down the hall, I see her son looking at me with her eyes! I just wanted one room that was ours!"
I stepped into the bedroom, holding out Barnaby and the torn scrapbook.
"Barnaby!" Benjamin cried, running to me and burying his face in the bear's coffee-stained fur.
Luca looked at the torn spine of the scrapbook in my hands, then at the shattered picture frames Marco held in the plastic bag by the door.
A muscle feathered in Luca's jaw.
For ten seconds, I genuinely thought I was about to watch the head of the Chicago syndicate kill a woman with his bare hands.
Instead, Luca reached down, took Vanessa's left hand, and pulled the four-carat emerald-cut diamond engagement ring straight off her finger.
"No!" Vanessa screamed, scrambling after his hand. "Luca, no! The wedding is in four days! The cathedral is booked! The newspapers—my father—"
"You have thirty minutes to take whatever belongs to you out of the master suite," Luca said, dropping the diamond ring into his shirt pocket. "Marco will watch you pack. If you touch a single item that belongs to my son or this household on your way out, you will leave in handcuffs."
"You can't do this to me!" she shrieked, her tear-streaked face twisting into fury as Marco stepped forward and took her firmly by the upper arm. "Do you know what my father knows about your shipping docks, Luca?! Do you think you can humiliate the Bellini family and walk away clean?!"
She twisted in Marco's grip as he dragged her toward the hallway, her eyes locking onto mine as she passed me.
"And you!" she spat at me, venom dripping from every word. "You think you won something tonight, you pathetic little maid?! I know where your crippled mother lives on South Halsted! You haven't seen the last of me!"
Luca stepped squarely in front of me, blocking her view entirely.
"Get her off my property, Marco," Luca said coldly. "And put two men at the front gates. If she or Victor come within five hundred yards of this fence, call me."
When Vanessa's screams finally faded down the marble staircase, the third-floor bedroom fell quiet again.
Benjamin was sitting on the edge of the bare mattress, hugging his coffee-stained bear with one arm and his wooden telescope with the other.
Luca looked at the stripped room, the broken model planes, and the shattered frames, and for the first time in the fourteen months I had worked for him, the untouchable mafia boss looked completely exhausted.
"Mr. Moretti," I said softly, stepping toward Mrs. Carter in the doorway. "If it's alright with you, we can take the cake and the telescope into the sunroom down the hall. The glass roof faces south—Benjamin can still see Orion from there tonight while I clean up his room."
Luca looked at me for a long, quiet moment.
His dark eyes searched my face as if he were truly seeing me for the first time—not just as the uniform that pressed his shirts and poured his wine, but as the woman who had stood between his son and a monster when nobody else was watching.
May you like
"No, Rachel," Luca said quietly, rolling down his cuffs. "Bring the cake in here. You and I are going to put his bed back together, and then the three of us are going to eat birthday cake on the floor."
====================================================================
Related Stories
