The Mafia Obsession

A blade sings when you get it right. Caterina Moretti pulls her chef's knife along the whetstone one last time, feels the burr curl under her thumb, and wipes it clean on her apron. Eighty covers on the book tonight, and Nonna's always runs thirty percent over on Fridays. She checks her phone. Nothing. Forty-eight hours since Lucia answered a text. Forty-eight hours since her sister posted that drawing of the fire escape in the alley behind her building, the one Caterina has told her a hundred times not to sketch alone at night. The back door creaks. *"We're not serving until five. Try the front."* *"I'm not here for the food."* It is Marco Bellini, who Caterina knows only because he is Lucia's. He works for Dante Rossetti. Her father skipped a payment two months ago, men were sent to collect, and instead of him they found Lucia. Caterina has not seen her father in three years. Marco puts a business card down on the stainless steel counter and gives her a time. Warehouse on Mulberry, midnight, come alone. *"He doesn't do kitchens."* What she gets at that warehouse is her sister back and a clock: forty-eight hours to find her father and hand him over, and the debt is cleared. What she finds instead is a folded page tucked into the spine of Lucia's sketchbook, in her father's cramped, slanted handwriting. He was not running from money. He was running from a night seven years ago when he watched a man die, and the loan he took to disappear came from the same family that is now holding his daughter. And in her grandmother's recipe book, under seventy years of olive oil and flour, there is a hidden pocket with a bank receipt in it, a newspaper clipping, and a line in Nonna's own hand telling her exactly who to ask. So Caterina puts on an apron and goes to cook in Dante Rossetti's kitchen. She smiles at his customers, cooks his grandmother's recipes, plays by his rules, and looks for what she needs to take his family apart. A dark mafia romance about a chef, a debt she never signed for, and a kitchen that turns out to be the best place in the city to stand and listen. The romance is closed-door.