Chapter 2 - The Sound of a Broken Pattern
By Claire’s fifth shift, Victor had stopped throwing glasses. By the seventh, he began taking his medication without being asked. By the ninth, something stranger happened: at 9:50 every evening, Victor started looking toward the bedroom door. Claire’s shift began at ten. Dominic noticed. Dominic noticed everything.
Then came Sunday dinner.
The Moretti family gathered at the enormous dining table: Dominic, his widowed sister Sophia, her nineteen-year-old son Ethan, Raymond DeLuca, and three longtime family associates. Claire stood quietly behind Victor’s chair. Sophia smiled coldly, her eyes fixed on the nurse. “So you’re the miracle worker.”
Claire shrugged. “I mostly annoy him until he forgets to be difficult.”
Victor grunted. Sophia’s smile disappeared. “My father doesn’t like strangers.”
“Neither do I.”
Sophia looked offended. Victor laughed again. Dominic watched his sister’s face tighten. That was when the family drama turned ugly. Sophia placed her fork down with a sharp clink against her porcelain plate. “Dad, you fired nurses who worked for this family for years. Now some woman you barely know walks in and suddenly she’s sitting at our table?”
“I invited her,” Victor barked.
“You don’t know her.”
Victor’s eyes hardened, gleaming with ancient steel. “I know she speaks to me like I’m still a man instead of a corpse waiting for paperwork.”
The room went silent. A grandfather clock ticked heavily in the hallway. Dominic looked at Sophia, his voice an absolute drop of ice. “Enough.”
“No,” Sophia insisted, her voice rising. “Someone has to say it. Since the stroke, this family has lost its mind. Dominic controls the business. Doctors control Dad’s body. Guards follow him to the bathroom. Now a nurse decides when he eats.”
Claire stepped backward into the shadows of the arched doorway. “This is a family conversation. I’ll wait outside.”
Victor slammed his good hand against the table, rattling the silverware. “That is exactly why she should hear it!”
Sophia stared at him, stunned. Victor pointed a gnarled finger toward Dominic. “My son watches every camera in this house.” Then toward Raymond. “He measures every weakness.” Then toward Sophia. “And you visit because you’re terrified I’ll die before changing my will.”
Sophia went pale, her makeup stark against her skin. “Dad—”
Victor’s voice cracked like thunder, echoing off the high ceiling. “Pero esa mujer? But that woman? She sat in my room for three hours and never once asked what I was leaving behind.”
Nobody moved. A heavy, suffocating tension filled the dining hall. Claire felt Dominic’s gaze heavy upon her back. Victor looked around the table, his breath coming in shallow rasps. “You all care whether I live. But half of you have forgotten how to let me live.”
He pushed his chair backward. Then his weakened hand slipped on the polished armrest. The wineglass beside him crashed to the floor in a splash of deep red. Victor lost his balance, his body listing forward.
Claire caught him before his head hit the marble floor, sliding her arms beneath his shoulders with professional, iron strength. For one terrible second, Victor’s entire body went rigid, his fingers digging into her forearm.
Then he whispered something into Claire’s ear that made her blood run cold:
“Don’t let Dominic know.”
Claire froze, supporting his heavy frame. “Know what?”
May you like
Victor gripped her wrist with surprising, desperate strength. His terrified eyes shifted across the room toward Raymond DeLuca, who was watching them with an unreadable expression. And for the first time since Claire entered the Moretti mansion, the legendary mafia boss looked genuinely, deeply afraid.
“I think someone in this family is trying to kill me.”
