The screen showed the kitchen. Adrienne appeared near Gabriel’s plate. She smiled at the chef, adjusted a sprig of dill, and left. No purse. No packet. No spoon.
Then a small figure entered the frame. A child. Yellow sweater. Pink leggings. Brown teddy bear. She reached toward Gabriel’s plate.
Adrienne paused the video. “I hate to say this,” she said softly, “but perhaps the child touched the food. Perhaps she imagined the rest. Or perhaps someone told her what to say.”
The room shifted. One capo cleared his throat. “Boss, children can be used.”
Gabriel said nothing.
By three o’clock, Nora had been questioned six different ways in the staff office. By four, someone had suggested, politely, that she and Annie leave the estate “for their safety.”
Annie was sitting alone near the pantry when Ray Donovan came for her. “Boss wants to see you.”
Gabriel waited in his study. Annie climbed into the leather chair across from him.
“Tell me the truth,” he said. “Did you touch my plate before it came into the dining room?”
“No.”
“The video shows you near it.”
“The video is fake.”
“How do you know?”
“Because the girl in the video is wearing a yellow sweater,” Annie said. “Mine was pink. Mama dyed it pink after I spilled grape juice on it. It has a strawberry on the pocket. I never had a yellow one.”
Gabriel stared at her. Then he picked up the phone. “Marco. Pull every photograph from last night. Guests, staff, the hired photographer, security stills. I want proof of what Annie wore.”
It took eighteen minutes.
Marco came in with a folder. Photo after photo showed Annie in the corridor, the kitchen, near the pantry door. Pink sweater. Strawberry pocket. Pink. Pink. Pink.
Marco’s voice was grim. “The girl is right. Adrienne’s footage was prepared before last night.”
Lucia stood by the bookshelf. “That means she planned the lie before she needed it.”
Gabriel closed the folder. His fiancée had not panicked after being accused. She had come armed with a second reality.
That evening, Gabriel ordered a full sweep of the estate. Ray’s men found the first listening device under Gabriel’s desk, taped beneath a drawer rail. They found another behind a framed painting. A third inside a lamp in the library. All had batteries worn from weeks of use.
Then Lucia opened the hidden wall safe behind the third shelf in the study. She looked inside. “One file is missing,” she said.
Gabriel already knew before asking. “Which?”
“The waterfront ledger.”
Marco swore under his breath. The ledger contained pier access schedules, customs contacts, shell companies, and private shipping routes—enough information to cripple the Moretti organization or sell it piece by piece.
Only one man would pay enough for it. Victor Kane.