Chapter 5 - The Engagement DinnerVictor ran.
Not walked. Not ordered someone else. Ran.
For one flashing second, he was not Chicago’s most feared man. He was only a father tearing through his own mansion toward the sound of his child screaming.
Marco followed with his gun drawn.
I was left in the blue sitting room with Agnes, a wounded guard, and a wheelchair that suddenly felt like a coffin with wheels.
Leo screamed again.
Pain and panic burned through me.
I grabbed the wheels of the chair.
Agnes watched me struggle with a strange calm.
“You won’t reach him,” she said.
I pushed harder. My shoulder screamed. My ribs felt as if they were splitting open.
“Move,” I snapped at the injured guard.
He staggered aside.
Agnes tilted her head. “Do you know why she liked you?”
I froze despite myself.
“Who?”
“Camila.” Agnes smiled faintly. “She liked girls who still believed good instincts could save bad men.”
I stared at her. “You knew her?”
“I knew her before Victor did.”
The admission hit me wrong.
Agnes had been head housekeeper, yes. Old staff, yes. But the way she said Camila’s name carried possession.
“You betrayed her,” I said.
Agnes’s eyes sharpened. “I protected this family longer than you’ve been alive.”
“From a six-year-old’s drawings?”
“From what those drawings would have done.”
Another scream tore through the house.
I shoved the wheelchair forward.
This time, Agnes stepped into my path.
“You think becoming his wife makes you powerful,” she said. “It makes you convenient. Camila thought love made her untouchable too.”
I looked up at her.
“No,” I said. “It made her dangerous.”
Then I slammed the footrest of the wheelchair into her shin.
Agnes cried out and fell sideways into the table.
I rolled past her into the hallway, nearly crashing into the wall as dizziness swept over me.
The estate had transformed into chaos.
Guards ran toward the west wing. Staff shouted. Somewhere, glass broke. I heard Victor’s voice, low and furious, giving orders that made everyone move faster.
I reached the corridor outside Leo’s playroom just as Marco came out carrying a limp body.
Not Leo.
A guard.
Blood soaked his shirt.
My heart stopped anyway.
“Where is he?” I gasped.
Marco barely glanced at me. “With his father.”
I moved past him.
The playroom door stood open.
Inside, toy cars lay scattered across the floor. A lamp had been knocked over. One window was cracked from the inside.
Victor knelt on the carpet with Leo crushed against his chest.
Leo was alive.
Crying, shaking, but alive.
I nearly collapsed from relief.
Victor looked up and saw me in the doorway. His face moved through anger, fear, disbelief, and something dangerously close to tenderness.
Then his eyes dropped to the blood spreading beneath my bandage.
“Clara.”
I looked down.
My side had reopened.
“Oh,” I said.
The room tilted.
Victor reached me before I hit the floor.
I woke the second time in my own bedroom, back in bed, with a doctor muttering angrily over my stitches and Victor standing at the footboard looking like he wanted to chain me to the mattress.
“Do not say it,” I whispered.
His jaw flexed.
The doctor said it for him. “You are going to tear yourself open and bleed to death if you keep treating major surgery like an inconvenience.”
“I was in a wheelchair.”
“You attacked a woman with it.”
“She was in my way.”
Victor made a sound that might have been a laugh in a different life.
The doctor left after making threats about restraints, which Victor seemed to consider too seriously.
Leo was asleep on a couch in the corner, wrapped in a blanket, with Marco standing nearby like a stone statue.
“What happened?” I asked.
Victor’s face hardened. “Someone opened the west gate remotely. Two men entered through the service drive wearing my security colors. They made it to Leo’s playroom before the alarm reset.”
“How?”
“Inside access.”
“Agnes?”
“She’s gone.”
I pushed myself up, wincing. “Gone?”
Victor’s eyes darkened. “Disappeared during the confusion.”
“How does an old housekeeper disappear from a locked mafia estate?”
“By not being only a housekeeper.”
The words chilled me.
Victor came closer and placed something on the bed.
A black phone.
“Marco found it beneath the blue sitting room table after she vanished,” he said. “Burner. One outgoing text sent three minutes before the west gate opened.”
“What did it say?”
Victor’s gaze held mine.
“BRING THE BOY. LEAVE THE WIFE BREATHING.”
I stared at him.
“Why leave me breathing?”
“I don’t know.”
But his voice said he feared he did.
The next day, Victor announced our engagement dinner.
I thought he had lost his mind.
“You want to host dinner?” I asked from the bed while a nurse changed my bandages. “After two attacks and a runaway housekeeper?”
“I want the people involved to believe I am distracted by you.”
“That is the worst romantic sentence ever spoken.”
“It is not romantic. It is strategy.”
“Comforting.”
Victor stood by the window, hands behind his back. “The Bellandis will hear Agnes is gone. They will hear you are wounded. They will assume weakness. So I will give them spectacle.”
“An engagement dinner.”
“Yes.”
“With who?”
“My captains. My cousins. My late wife’s brother. Several men who claim loyalty loudly enough to make me suspicious.”
“And me?”
“You sit beside me.”
“Like bait.”
His silence answered.
I looked away.
Victor crossed the room. “Clara.”
“No. Don’t make your voice soft now. You’re using me.”
“Yes.”
The honesty hit harder than a lie.
He sat on the edge of the chair near my bed. “I am using your position. Not your life. There is a difference.”
“Small one.”
“I will not let harm come to you.”
“You keep saying that after harm comes to me.”
That landed.
Victor looked down at his hands.
For the first time, I noticed the faint scars across his knuckles. Old fights. Old violence. A man made of sharp history.
“I built walls,” he said quietly. “I paid guards. I bought judges. I buried enemies. I thought that meant my son was safe.”
I looked at Leo sleeping in the corner.
Victor followed my gaze.
“Then you, with no weapon and no reason to care about my bloodline, did what all my power failed to do.”
His voice lowered.
“You got to him first.”
My anger softened against my will.
“I care about Leo,” I said.
“I know.”
“That doesn’t mean I know how to survive your world.”
Victor looked back at me.
“Then let me teach you.”
The dinner took place three nights later in the formal dining room.
I wore a black dress because Victor said color made me an easier target and because I refused to wear white like some rescued princess. The dress covered my bandages but not my bruises. I left those visible.
Let them look.
They did.
Twelve men and three women sat beneath chandeliers while guards lined the walls. Crystal glasses gleamed. Silver knives caught candlelight. The table had been set by hands I knew, but no one met my eyes.
Victor sat at the head.
I sat at his right.
That chair had belonged to Camila.
Everyone knew it.
The silence tasted like blood.
Victor lifted his glass. “To my wife.”
A murmur moved through the room.
Not fiancée.
Wife.
I looked at him sharply.
He did not look back.
A thick-necked man halfway down the table smiled without warmth. Dominic Russo. One of Victor’s captains. I had washed blood from his cuffs twice.
“Forgive me,” Dominic said. “Did we miss the wedding?”
Victor’s eyes stayed cold. “Yes.”
A ripple of shock.
My fingers tightened around my fork.
Beside Dominic, a woman with red hair and perfect diamonds laughed softly. “How sudden. How romantic.”
Victor looked at her. “Careful, Bianca.”
Her smile faded.
A man at the far end leaned back in his chair. He had Camila’s dark eyes. Her brother, Adrian Bellandi.
So the Bellandis were not only enemies.
They were family.
That explained the room’s poison.
Adrian lifted his wine. “My sister’s chair looks good filled so quickly.”
Victor did not move.
But the guards did.
Every man at the table felt it.
I should have stayed quiet.
A good survivor would have stayed quiet.
But I looked at Adrian and said, “Your sister’s chair was empty because someone murdered her. Maybe direct your grief there.”
A dead silence fell.
Adrian stared at me.
Then he smiled.
Slowly.
“I see why Victor likes you.”
“He doesn’t like me. I’m inconvenient.”
Victor said, “She is correct.”
Someone choked on wine.
For one impossible second, Leo’s laugh from childhood seemed to echo in my memory, and I almost smiled.
Then the first course arrived.
Soup.
I smelled it before the bowl touched the table.
Almond.
Not strong. Barely there.
But years of cleaning kitchens, handling supplies, and listening to chefs curse spoiled extracts had taught me scents.
My spoon froze.
Victor noticed.
“What?” he murmured.
I looked at Leo’s empty chair near the side door. He was not at dinner, thank God.
Then I looked down the table.
Adrian Bellandi watched me too closely.
I lowered my spoon.
“Don’t eat,” I whispered.
Victor did not hesitate.
He dropped his spoon.
Every guard in the room reached for a weapon.
Dominic laughed. “Is the new wife already rejecting the menu?”
I picked up my bowl with shaking hands and stood despite the pain.
Victor rose with me.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Testing a theory.”
I walked three steps to Dominic Russo and switched my soup with his.
His face changed.
Just a flicker.
Enough.
“Eat,” I said.
The room went still.
Dominic’s smile vanished.
Victor’s voice became deadly soft.
“Yes, Dominic,” he said. “Eat.”
Dominic looked at the bowl.
Then at Adrian.
May you like
And that was how everyone in the room learned the attack had not come only from outside the gates.
It had been sitting at Victor’s table the entire time.
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