Chapter 2 - The Midnight Oil
By 11:42 p.m., Bellandi Tower was a ghost town. The cleaning crew had already finished the 37th floor, their vacuum cleaners a distant hum that had long since faded.
Grace sat on the floor of Luca’s private office, surrounded by concentric circles of open folders. She had kicked off her cheap heels, her curls completely loose now, a pencil tucked behind her ear. Her eyes burned from staring at the tiny, intricate variations of the letter L and the pressure of the ink on the page.
Luca was still there, sitting at his desk, silently reading through intelligence reports. The only sound in the room was the rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock and the scratching of Grace’s pen.
"You're shaking," Luca said suddenly, breaking the six-hour silence.
Grace paused, a yellow sticky note hovering in her hand. "Just too much caffeine, Mr. Bellandi."
"When was the last time you ate?"
"I had an apple at noon."
Luca let out a soft sigh, standing up from his chair. He walked over to his private bar, poured two fingers of amber whiskey into a crystal glass, and then picked up a small silver tray containing a half-eaten plate of artisanal cheese and cured meats his driver had brought in earlier.
He walked over and sat on the leather sofa near her, placing the tray on the coffee table. "Sit."
Grace hesitated, looking at her ink-stained fingers. "I shouldn't—"
"That wasn't a request, Grace. Sit and eat. You're no use to me if you faint on my marble floor."
She climbed up from the floor, her joints popping from hours of sitting in one position, and sat on the edge of the plush leather sofa. She kept a respectful distance, but the scent of his expensive cologne—sandalwood and expensive tobacco—invaded her senses.
She took a small piece of cheese, her hand trembling slightly.
"Your resume," Luca said, swirling his whiskey. "You spent six years in corporate compliance at one of the biggest investment firms in New York. You were on track to become a senior partner. Then, in 2020, you vanished. No employment history, no tax filings, nothing until you applied for a low-level secretarial pool here."
Grace’s muscles tightened. She stared at her lap. "My father got sick," she whispered. "Early-onset dementia. It was fast, and it was violent. My mother passed away when I was young, so there was no one else. I had to sell my apartment, pack up my life, and move back to Massachusetts to take care of him. By the time he was settled in a full-time care facility, my credentials had expired, my savings were gone, and the corporate world doesn't look kindly on women who take half a decade off to be a nurse."
She looked up, expecting to see the typical judgment or polite pity she received from interviewers.
Instead, Luca was staring at her with an intensity that made her breath hitch. There was no pity in his eyes—only a profound, quiet understanding.
"My mother died of cancer when I was twenty," Luca said softly, his voice carrying the weight of a memory he rarely shared. "My father was already gone, and my grandfather was too busy teaching me how to run an empire to notice I was drowning. In my world, taking care of your own is the only law that matters. You did what was honorable, Grace. Never apologize for that."
For a moment, the vast chasm between the cold mafia boss and the clumsy, broke secretary vanished. They were just two people who had stood in the dark, holding the hands of the people they loved while the world passed them by.
"Thank you," she whispered.
"Don't thank me yet," Luca said, standing up and returning to his cold, businesslike demeanor. "We still have three years of records to go through."
Grace took a deep breath, stood up, and went back to her circles of folders.
It was 3:15 in the morning when she found it.
She was looking at a 2024 tax amortization sheet for a luxury residential development in the Back Bay. The document had cleared the IRS, the city council, and the Bellandi Group’s internal audit.
But as Grace compared the signature to the reference sheet, her heart stopped.
The L was perfect. The loop was standard. But the final stroke—the tiny, aggressive flick of the pen that Luca always made when he was finished writing—was missing. Instead, the ink pooled slightly at the end, as if the writer had hesitated, making sure the line looked exact.
She turned the page. Underneath was a secondary schedule of assets—a list of private offshore accounts where twenty-two million dollars of Bellandi Group’s capital had been redirected under the guise of "construction material imports."
"Mr. Bellandi," Grace called out, her voice barely a whisper.
Luca was instantly on his feet, walking over to her. "What is it?"
She pointed to the signature, then to the asset schedule. "This signature is a forgery. And whoever did this didn't just steal thirty million today. They've been draining your private accounts for over eighteen months. Look at the routing numbers."
Luca knelt beside her, his face inches from hers as he studied the document. As his eyes scanned the bank routing codes, his jaw clenched so hard a muscle ticked in his cheek.
"These routing numbers belong to a bank in Switzerland," Luca whispered, his voice vibrating with a lethal, icy rage. "A bank where only one other person has authorization to deposit Bellandi Group capital."
May you like
He looked at Grace, his eyes dark with the promise of violence.
"Paul DeVries."
