Chapter 2 - The Problem Behind the Invitation

Roman did not show me the message at first.

He turned his phone facedown on the marble counter, and the small movement bothered me more than if he had cursed. Roman Rossi did not strike me as a man who hid reactions. He controlled them. There was a difference.

“What problem?” I asked.

His gaze rested on me for a moment, measuring how much to say.

“My security chief found someone asking questions about you.”

I almost laughed. “About me?”

“Yes.”

“Why would anyone ask questions about a maid?”

His jaw tightened. “That is exactly what I intend to find out.”

The kitchen no longer felt lonely. It felt watched.

Roman picked up his phone and made a call. He spoke quietly in Italian, too quickly for me to follow, then ended it after less than thirty seconds.

I folded my arms over my apron. “Mr. Rossi, I appreciate whatever this is, but I’m not involved in your business.”

“I know.”

“Then maybe whoever asked about me just wanted a reference.”

“At two in the morning?”

That silenced me.

He walked to the windows and looked into the black garden beyond the glass. “A man named Victor Dane contacted one of my drivers. He offered him five thousand dollars for your schedule.”

My mouth went dry.

“My schedule?”

“Where you live. When you leave the estate. Whether you have family in the city.”

I stared at him, waiting for the sentence to become ridiculous.

It did not.

“Who is Victor Dane?”

Roman looked back at me. “That is another problem.”

He knew the name.

I saw it immediately.

“Tell me.”

“He works for people who do not ask harmless questions.”

The warmth left my hands.

For one second, my sister’s rehearsal dinner, Derek, table 12, my mother’s messages—all of it seemed painfully small. I had been crying because I was afraid of humiliation. Now a stranger wanted to know when I was alone.

Roman stepped closer, but not so close that I felt trapped.

“Did anyone contact you this week?”

“No.”

“Any strange calls?”

“I get spam calls.”

“Anyone following you?”

“I don’t know.”

The answer frightened me more than I expected.

He studied my face. “You take the Red Line home?”

“Usually.”

“Not tonight.”

I shook my head. “I can get home by myself.”

“That is not what I asked.”

Anger flashed through my fear. “You don’t get to decide where I go just because I work for you.”

Something changed in his expression. Not anger. Approval, maybe.

“Good,” he said.

“What?”

“Keep saying no when men decide for you.”

I blinked.

Then he added, “But tonight you are not taking the train.”

I almost laughed again.

Roman called someone named Luca and ordered a car.

I hated how relieved I felt.

Ten minutes later, I was sitting in the back seat of a black sedan with Roman beside me.

“Why are you coming?” I asked.

“To make sure you arrive.”

“You have employees for that.”

“Yes.”

“Then why?”

He looked out the window. “Because someone asked about you while you were inside my house.”

The wording was strange. Territorial without being romantic. Like I had become part of a boundary someone had crossed.

Chicago passed outside in bands of amber streetlight.

I gave him my address reluctantly.

He did not comment when we pulled up to my brick apartment building in Rogers Park. He did not comment on the laundromat downstairs or the flickering hallway light.

He only said, “Pack for tomorrow.”

I stared at him. “Pack what?”

“You are not staying here tonight.”

“No.”

“Sadi.”

“No.”

His voice stayed calm. “Someone paid for your routine.”

“And I am not sleeping in my employer’s house because you say so.”

A tiny pause.

“Guest wing,” he said.

“That is not the point.”

“What is the point?”

I opened my mouth, then stopped.

The point was that I had spent years letting people define me by what made them comfortable. My mother placed me near the kitchen. Derek told me I should take better care of myself. Employers called me “sweetheart” while handing me extra work. Strangers stared when I ate dessert.

Now Roman Rossi, powerful enough to command a room without raising his voice, was telling me where to sleep.

Even if he meant to protect me, I could not trade one kind of invisibility for another.

“The point,” I said, “is that I decide.”

Roman held my gaze.

Then he nodded once.

“All right.”

I was so surprised I almost missed it.

He got out of the car.

“What are you doing?”

“Walking you upstairs.”

“I just said—”

“You decide where you sleep. I decide whether I stand in a public hallway for ninety seconds.”

I should have argued.

Instead, I rolled my eyes and got out.

At my apartment door, I found a white envelope tucked beneath the mat.

I stopped.

Roman saw it at the same time.

“Don’t touch it.”

My stomach twisted.

There was no stamp.

No address.

Just my name in black ink.

SADI MILLER.

Roman pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and lifted the envelope by one corner. Inside was a single photograph.

He did not hand it to me.

His face changed.

“Let me see.”

“Sadi.”

“Let me see it.”

He turned the photograph around.

It was me.

Taken that morning.

I was leaving a coffee shop two blocks from the estate, holding a paper cup and looking down at my phone.

A red circle had been drawn around my face.

On the back were four words.

ASK YOUR MOTHER ABOUT ENZO.

I stopped breathing.

Roman read the sentence twice.

“Who is Enzo?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think.”

“I said I don’t know.”

The hallway tilted.

My mother had never mentioned anyone named Enzo. My father had died when I was eleven. I had grown up with photographs, birthdays, school plays, rent overdue, casseroles, arguments, ordinary things.

There was no Enzo.

Roman put the photograph back into the envelope.

“We’re calling your mother.”

“No.”

“This message involves her.”

“I am not calling my mother at two thirty in the morning and asking whether she knows a man tied to people who buy schedules.”

“Then call her at six.”

I looked at him.

He was serious.

Of course he was.

“You still expect to come to the rehearsal dinner?”

“Yes.”

“Even after this?”

“Especially after this.”

I unlocked my apartment.

Roman entered only when I stepped aside.

He checked the rooms quickly with the practiced attention of someone who had done it before. Bedroom. Bathroom. Closet. Fire escape.

Then he stood in my tiny living room beside the watercolor paintings stacked against the wall.

His eyes moved to them.

I suddenly wished I had hidden them.

“You painted these?”

“They’re old.”

“They’re good.”

I shrugged.

He looked at one of a woman standing under a yellow umbrella.

“Why did you stop?”

“Life.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It’s the one I have.”

He did not push.

I packed an overnight bag, though I still had not agreed to stay at his estate.

When I came back into the living room, Roman was studying a framed family photograph on the shelf.

My mother. Chloe. Me.

My father stood behind us.

Roman’s attention narrowed.

“What?”

He picked up the frame.

“Your father’s name?”

“Michael Miller.”

“Birth name?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“Answer it.”

I felt irritation rising. “Michael Anthony Miller.”

Roman turned the frame slightly toward the light.

My father was smiling in the photograph. Thick dark hair, broad shoulders, kind eyes. He had been thirty-nine when he died in a car accident on Lake Shore Drive.

Roman stared at him too long.

“You recognize him.”

Roman set the frame down carefully.

“I might.”

“From where?”

He did not answer.

I stepped in front of him.

“You don’t get to bring danger to my door and then go silent.”

“I did not bring this here.”

“You know what I mean.”

Roman looked at the photograph again.

“When I was a teenager, my father had a man who handled accounts for several legitimate companies.”

My heart began beating faster.

“His name was Enzo.”

I went still.

Roman continued. “Enzo Bellini. Brilliant with numbers. Careful. Quiet. He disappeared twenty years ago after money vanished from one of the family corporations.”

I tried to make the words fit my life.

They would not.

“What does that have to do with my father?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You recognized him.”

“I recognized a younger version of him.”

My throat tightened.

Roman reached into his jacket and took out his phone. He searched through an old photo archive, then handed me the screen.

Four men stood outside a restaurant.

One was Roman’s father, younger but unmistakable.

Beside him stood a man with dark hair and a familiar crooked smile.

My father.

Except beneath the scanned photograph was a typed label:

ENZO BELLINI — FINANCIAL OPERATIONS.

I stared at the screen until the letters blurred.

“That isn’t possible.”

Roman said nothing.

“My father was Michael Miller.”

“Sadi—”

“He sold insurance.”

Roman’s expression softened in a way I had never seen before.

“Maybe he did.”

I looked at the family photo on my shelf.

A dozen childhood memories rearranged themselves without permission. My father checking the locks twice. My father refusing to keep bank statements. My father insisting we move apartments every few years. My father teaching me never to sign anything I had not read.

Small things.

Ordinary things.

Until they were not.

I sat down hard on the couch.

Roman crouched in front of me, keeping distance between us.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “we find out what your mother knows.”

I closed my eyes.

“She’s going to lie.”

“How do you know?”

“Because if my father had another name and she never told me, she already has.”

That was the first moment Roman looked genuinely sorry for me.

Not pitying.

Sorry.

It was worse.

I opened my eyes.

“Take me back to the estate.”

He stood.

No victory in his face.

No I told you so.

Just a nod.

As I locked my apartment behind me, I looked once more at the envelope in Roman’s hand.

I had spent years thinking the most painful thing about my family was how little space they wanted me to occupy.

By sunrise, I understood something darker.

May you like

[COMPLETED] “GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY DRESS! YOU’RE NOTHING BUT AN OLD SEAM...

[COMPLETED] At the Mafia Boss's Engagement Party, I Served His Hungry So...

[COMPLETED] The Mafia Boss’s Fiancée Tried to Dismiss His Father’s Loyal...

Maybe they had not been trying to hide me because they were ashamed.

Maybe they had been trying to hide me because someone was still looking.