Chapter 1 - THE FLOWERS THAT WEREN’T THERE
The first spoonful of soup was still warm when Sofia Reyes felt the room
tilt.
At first, she blamed the long evening. The Moretti estate had been full
of guests since sunset, and the chandeliers made every polished surface
shine too brightly. At twenty-nine, Sofia was accustomed to working
under pressure, but restoring the late Isabella Moretti’s portrait had
brought her into a world where every glance seemed to carry a private
meaning.
Then her fingers went numb.
She set the spoon down carefully, hoping no one would notice. Across the
dining table, Dante Moretti was listening to his uncle discuss a
shipping contract. Dante was thirty-six, controlled to the point of
seeming cold, and handsome in the severe way of men who had learned
early that showing emotion could be used against them. Yet Sofia had
seen him alone in the portrait gallery, staring at his mother’s painted
face as if the canvas might answer him.
Tonight, he had asked Sofia to sit beside him.
“Are you all right?” he murmured when she failed to respond to a
question.
She tried to say yes. Her tongue felt too heavy.
The room swayed harder. Sofia gripped the edge of the table, but her
chair scraped backward. A glass tipped over. Someone gasped as she
staggered to her feet.
Dante was moving before anyone else understood what was happening. He
caught her around the waist just as her knees folded.
“Sofia!” His voice cut through the conversation. “Look at me. What’s
wrong?”
She couldn’t make the words come. Her heart hammered. The dining room
lights blurred into golden smears, and the faces around her became a
wall of startled strangers.
Then she saw the flowers.
A tall arrangement of pink camellias stood on the sideboard near the
windows. Their petals were perfect, almost waxy, and a narrow black
ribbon had been tied around the vase. Sofia had noticed the sideboard
earlier that afternoon. It had been empty.
She raised a shaking hand and pointed.
“The flowers?” Dante asked. “You’re looking at the flowers?”
She tried again, more urgently. Her hand trembled so violently that
Dante tightened his hold on her.
“Someone get a doctor!” he shouted.
The head housekeeper, Mrs. Bell, hurried forward. “Mr. Moretti, those
weren’t there this morning. I swear it. I polished that sideboard before
breakfast.”
Dante’s expression changed. The worry remained, but something colder
settled beneath it.
“Who brought them in?”
“No one on my staff, sir.”
Sofia’s eyes rolled back. Dante lowered her carefully to the floor,
supporting her head while the guests erupted into confusion. He shouted
for someone to call an ambulance and ordered every door in the dining
room kept closed. When Sofia’s breathing grew shallow, he pressed two
fingers to her wrist and counted the beats aloud as if numbers could
keep her with him.
“Stay with me,” he whispered. “You hear me? You are not leaving this
room.”
The paramedics arrived within minutes. They carried Sofia out beneath
the stunned gaze of the guests. Dante followed, refusing to let anyone
else ride with her. Before the ambulance doors closed, he looked back at
the housekeeper.
“Lock down the estate. No one leaves.”
At the hospital, the emergency doctor told Dante that Sofia had suffered
a sudden toxic reaction. The medical team was still identifying the
substance, but her condition was serious enough that they wanted to keep
her under observation.
“Was it the soup?” Dante asked.
“We can’t confirm that yet. We’re testing everything she consumed.”
Dante’s hands curled into fists. “Then test the flowers, the vase, the
plates, the water. Everything.”
He returned to the estate after midnight. The dining room had been
sealed, the guests sent home under strict instructions, and the
remaining staff gathered in the kitchen. No one had touched the
camellias.
Dante stood in front of them, staring at the black ribbon. His mother
had loved pink camellias. After her death, he had forbidden the
gardeners to grow them. The greenhouse had been closed for eighteen
years.
He went straight to the security office.
“Show me every camera covering the dining room,” he told the head of
security.
The footage ran through the afternoon: staff carrying trays, guests
arriving, the dining room empty, then full. At 5:42 p.m., a woman
entered through the service corridor. She wore a dark coat and kept her
face turned away from the camera. She crossed to the sideboard, placed
the vase, and stood still for several seconds, looking toward the chair
Sofia would later occupy.
Then she touched something at her throat.
Dante leaned closer to the monitor.
A small silver locket hung from a chain around the woman’s neck. Even
through the grainy footage, he recognized its oval shape and the tiny
engraved star on the clasp.
It had belonged to his mother, Isabella.
Dante had watched them lower an empty coffin into the ground after the
fire that supposedly killed her. His father had told him the locket was
lost with everything else in the flames.
The woman on the screen turned slightly. Her face remained hidden, but
the locket caught the light.
Dante felt the blood drain from his face.
He replayed the moment three times. Then he called his private
investigator.
“I want her name,” he said. “I want to know how she got into my house,
why she brought those flowers, and where she got my mother’s locket.”
He paused, watching the woman vanish through the service corridor.
May you like
“And if anyone tells you my mother is dead, don’t believe them until you
prove it.”
