Chapter 4 - A Ghost in the Penthouse
By midnight, the temperature had dropped below freezing. Snow flurried against the glass of the penthouse, melting into grey tears that slid down the dark panorama of the city.
Lucian sat on the floor of the nursery.
He had not turned on the overhead chandelier. The only illumination came from the streetlights forty stories below, casting long, geometric shadows across the pristine room.
The walls were painted a soft, muted sage. A white oak crib stood against the far wall, fitted with a fitted sheet printed with tiny grey constellations. On the changing table, three sets of infant sleepsuits lay neatly folded, beside a thermometer and a silver rattle Lucian had never seen.
In the center of the rug lay the silver music box he had sent from Naples.
It remained wrapped in its silver paper, the navy ribbon intact, the card still tucked beneath the bow: *For my little prince. Love, Dad.*
She hadn't even opened it.
A floorboard creaked in the corridor.
"Lucian?"
The voice was soft, hesitant, scented with vanilla and amber.
Bianca Romano stood in the doorway. She wore an ivory silk robe, her dark hair tumbling over her shoulders in loose waves. She had arrived on the afternoon flight from Rome, expecting the triumph of a mistress who had finally displaced the long-suffering wife. She had entered the penthouse with her designer luggage, her laughter light, expecting to find Lucian waiting with open arms and an empire ripe for the taking.
Instead, she had found a dark tomb.
Lucian did not turn his head. "Who told you that you could come here?"
Bianca stepped into the room, her bare feet silent on the thick wool rug. She knelt beside him, placing a manicured hand with its pale pink nails onto his forearm.
"Your drivers let me in," she whispered, her voice husky with practiced tenderness. "Dante wouldn't speak to me, but the young one... he brought my bags up. Lucian, you haven't slept in two days. Come to bed. Let the lawyers handle her. She’s just trying to hurt you because she knows she’s lost."
Lucian looked down at her hand.
He remembered her in Ravello, leaning over the balustrade in a sheer linen dress, laughing as the afternoon sun hit the wine in her glass. She had seemed so effortless, so light. With Bianca, he had not been the man who spent eighty hours a week navigating federal indictments and union strikes. He had been an aristocrat, an untouchable lord of commerce who could buy youth and beauty with the sweep of a fountain pen.
He looked at her now.
In the dim light of his son’s nursery, she looked grotesque.
Her youth looked like ignorance. Her beauty looked like a receipt for services rendered.
"She hasn't lost anything," Lucian said. His voice was empty, flat as stone.
"She’s taken your companies, Lucian! She’s trying to humiliate you—"
"I gave them to her," he said.
"Then take them back!" Bianca’s voice sharpened, the veneer of gentle seduction cracking to reveal the anxious opportunist beneath. "You have men. You have influence. You can’t let a woman who came from a tenement in the Bronx dictate terms to you—"
Lucian’s fingers closed around her wrist.
He didn't squeeze hard enough to break bone, but he gripped her with the cold, immovable force of an anchor dropping into silt.
Bianca gasped, trying to pull away. "Lucian, you're hurting me."
"When I met Serena," Lucian said, his voice terrifyingly quiet, "I had six thousand dollars in a checking account and a subpoena from the Eastern District of New York. I had two trucks with cracked engine blocks and four men who were ready to put a bullet in my head over an unpaid loan."
He pulled her closer, until she could smell the scotch on his breath and the dead, hollow cold in his eyes.
"She worked fourteen hours a day at an accounting firm, and then she came home to my kitchen and rewrote my books so the feds couldn't seize my equipment. She stood on the docks in the middle of February with a clipboard when I was shot in the shoulder, running the shifts so the longshoremen wouldn't know I was bleeding in a basement."
He looked at Bianca’s smooth, unblemished face.
"You have never worked a day in your life. You have never bled for anything. You don't even know what a manifest looks like."
He released her wrist so abruptly she fell backward onto her hands.
"Pack your bags," he said.
Bianca stared at him, her chest heaving, tears of shock and fury welling in her eyes. "You brought me to Italy. You told me you were tired of her coldness—"
"I was tired of being reminded of what I owed," Lucian said, turning his back on her to look at the unopened music box. "Now get out of my son’s room before I have Dante throw your luggage into the river."
She scrambled to her feet, her silk robe rustling as she fled down the hall. Moments later, the heavy front door slammed shut, echoing through the empty apartment like a dry hammer falling on an empty chamber.
Lucian reached out. His large, scarred hand touched the corner of the silver music box.
He picked it up. He tore the ribbon away with a single violent jerk of his thumb. He ripped the paper off and threw it into the dark.
Inside was the porcelain prince, revolving on its silver pedestal under tiny painted stars. He turned the key on the bottom.
A tinny, high-pitched lullaby began to chime—frail, lonely, and absurdly delicate in the massive, quiet room.
May you like
Lucian Moretti lowered his face into his hands and sat in the dark until the spring ran down.
***
