[COMPLETED] The Mafia Boss Asked Why His Maid Couldn't Stand Straight—His Fiancée Answered Before the Maid Could Speak

For a moment, Luca Moretti didn't answer me.

The recording device sat on his desk, its tiny green light still blinking. I could hear the air conditioning above us and the distant movement of guests leaving the dining room. My lower back ached beneath the ice pack. I had just repeated what Vanessa said about his will, and I wished there were a way to take the words back without making them untrue.

Luca looked at the closed study door.

“Tell me exactly when you heard that.”

“After she pushed me. I was outside the door. She thought I'd gone downstairs.”

“Were you listening deliberately?”

“No. I was trying to walk without crying.”

He nodded once. It was an acknowledgment, not a judgment.

“Did the man answer her?”

“I couldn't hear him then. Only her.”

For the first time since he had found me struggling with the mirror, I saw something beneath Luca's composure. It wasn't rage. It was the calculation of a man beginning to understand that people he trusted had been using his home against him.

He slid the little recorder toward Daniel, who had returned to the study. “Don't disconnect anything else. Photograph it where it is, record what we've touched, and preserve the connection information. I want my attorney involved before anyone accesses an account that isn't ours.”

Daniel glanced at me, then at the ice pack. “Understood.”

Luca turned back. “Claire, there is something I need to ask. Are you afraid Vanessa will hurt you again?”

I stared at the edge of his desk. Saying yes seemed disloyal to the household that paid my wages. Saying no would have been foolish.

“Yes.”

“Then she will not be allowed near you tonight.”

“You can't promise what happens after I leave.”

His expression changed at that. He hadn't expected me to challenge him. Neither had I.

“No,” he said after a moment. “I can't. But I can make sure you aren't sent home alone, and I can help you speak to someone outside this house.”

Dr. Harris had already told me to rest. Mrs. Carter returned with my coat and offered a guest room for the night, but I wanted my own apartment. My mother had an appointment the following week, and I needed to know I could still get her there. Most of all, I wanted a place where Vanessa couldn't appear in a doorway and tell me how to remember what had happened.

Luca listened without interrupting. Then he asked Mrs. Carter to arrange a car and to make certain I received my full shift's pay. He didn't offer me a fortune or insist I become his responsibility. Instead, he wrote down the name of an independent employment lawyer and asked if I wanted her to call me in the morning.

“I don't know if I can afford a lawyer,” I said.

“The consultation will be paid for. You decide whether to use her.”

That distinction mattered more than he seemed to realize.

While Mrs. Carter collected my things, Daniel explained what he had learned. The black device was a cellular recorder. It could upload audio without using the mansion's wireless network. The connection led to a private hosting service, but the company had not yet identified the person controlling the account. Luca ordered him not to guess.

“We have one device,” he said. “We don't have the person behind it.”

Daniel nodded. “The decorator who delivered the mirror may know something.”

“Get the delivery paperwork,” Luca said. “And the record of every time that mirror changed rooms.”

I looked up. “It was in the guest bedroom yesterday.”

“I know,” Luca replied. “I remember seeing it there.”

“Mrs. Carter had it taken back to your study this afternoon. She said Miss Bellini requested it.”

He was silent for a beat. The mirror had been delivered the previous Thursday for his study. It had then been moved upstairs, returned to the study, and brought into the dining room. Vanessa had supplied a different reason each time.

“I should have noticed,” he said.

I wanted to tell him that people who work in other people's homes notice movement because they must. They remember which objects belong in which rooms. The owners can afford not to. But I was too tired to put the thought into words.

At the doorway, he stopped me with another question.

“Did she say who the man was?”

“No.”

“And you didn't see him?”

“No, sir.”

“Then we aren't going to turn your fear into a certainty you never had. That would make it easier for someone to discredit what you did see.”

I hadn't expected that from him either.

When I crossed the hall, I glimpsed Vanessa near the staircase in her red silk gown. She was speaking to a departing guest, smiling exactly as she'd smiled over dinner. Then her eyes met mine. The smile remained, but she stopped talking.

Mrs. Carter moved slightly closer to me. I kept walking.

In the car, I held the folded drawing my mother had given me years earlier, a little sketch of our first apartment. I sometimes carried it in my purse on difficult days. The paper was soft at the creases. I wasn't certain why I had taken it out. Perhaps I needed something that belonged to a life in which the rules were simple.

My phone vibrated before we reached the gates.

It was a message from the estate's scheduling account, not Vanessa's number. Tomorrow's shift had been removed from my calendar. A second notification said my access credentials were temporarily inactive.

I showed the driver, who said he could call Mrs. Carter. I asked him not to. I took screenshots instead.