Chapter 2 - The Ghost in the Medicine Cabinet
Alessandra Vale did not retreat easily.
She was the daughter of Paul Vale, a man who had controlled the city’s concrete unions for three decades before his mysterious drowning in the Chicago River.
She was born into ruthless deceit, groomed to maintain composure in rooms filled with blood and velvet.
“It was an associate,” Alessandra stammered, her voice tightening as she fought for control.
“A resident covering his private caseload while he was abroad.”
“He called from an unlisted number and gave me verbal instructions.”
“I had our in-house courier fetch the updated dose from an emergency dispatch service because I didn't want your mother suffering another arrhythmia.”
She gestured wildly at the table of frozen guests.
“I am trying to keep your family alive, Matteo.”
“And you are allowing a South Side maid to interrogate me at our engagement dinner.”
Matteo didn't blink.
He slipped the amber bottle into his jacket pocket.
“Where is the original bottle, Claire?” Matteo asked, ignoring his fiancée entirely.
“I left it on the second shelf of Donna Carmela’s master suite medicine cabinet at noon,” I answered clearly.
“Beside her blood pressure monitor and her sterile gauze.”
Alessandra spoke before anyone else could breathe.
“I threw it in the incinerator chute.”
A dangerous stillness swept the room.
Matteo turned his eyes toward her, cold and calculating.
“You threw away sealed medicine?”
“It was empty,” she snapped defensively.
“It was completely empty, Matteo.”
“Why would I keep an empty bottle cluttering your mother’s vanity?”
“There were eleven tablets remaining,” I countered instantly.
Alessandra’s eyes widened with sudden, murderous rage.
“You insolent little liar.”
“I counted them last night when I organized her weekly pillbox,” I said, looking directly at the boss.
“There were fourteen tablets when I brought the prescription home yesterday.”
“Donna Carmela took half a tablet yesterday evening.”
“She took half a tablet this morning.”
“That left precisely eleven tablets in the glass vial.”
Matteo’s jaw clenched so hard a cord of muscle jumped in his cheek.
He looked toward his two senior captains seated halfway down the table.
“The dinner is concluded,” Matteo announced in a voice that brooked no discussion.
“Cars will take everyone home.”
“Silas, close the front gates.”
“No one enters the grounds, and no one leaves until I say so.”
The twenty-six guests rose in hurried, terrified compliance, abandoning their vintage wine and unfinished meals without a word.
The heavy mahogany chairs scraped against the floor like muffled groans as the Chicago elite scurried out into the cold October drizzle.
Within two minutes, the grand dining hall was deserted, leaving only the scent of extinguished candles, Matteo, Alessandra, two armed bodyguards, Donna Carmela, and me.
“Upstairs,” Matteo commanded.
He didn't wait.
He stepped behind his mother’s wheelchair and personally pushed her toward the private gilded elevator.
Alessandra stood rooted to the spot for a fraction of a second, her hands balling into fists, before she marched behind him.
Silas motioned for me with a sharp jerk of his chin.
“Move, Claire.”
My heart was thumping against my ribs like a caged bird as we ascended to the third floor.
The third floor housed the private family suites, protected by reinforced steel-core doors and security cameras every ten feet.
The air up here smelled of polished cedar, dried lavender, and old leather.
Matteo wheeled his mother into her master bathroom, a palatial room clad in imported Calacatta marble with gold-plated fixtures.
He stepped in front of the illuminated vanity and pulled open the mirrored cabinet.
The shelves were impeccably neat.
Rows of skin creams, silk sleep masks, and sterile medical alcohol sat in orderly rows.
The shelf where Donna Carmela’s heart medication belonged was completely bare.
Alessandra stepped into the doorway, leaning against the marble frame with a thin, mocking smile playing at the corners of her lips.
“There,” she whispered, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Are you satisfied, Matteo?”
“The shelf is empty.”
“Your devoted little maid made up a fantasy to make herself seem indispensable.”
“She probably stole the pills to sell them to junkies on the South Side.”
Panic spiked in my chest.
I knew where I had put that bottle.
I was meticulous.
When you grow up with a disabled father who relies on precise insulin timing, you do not misplace life-saving medicine.
“Check the trash, Silas,” Matteo ordered coldly.
Silas stepped forward, opening the gold-rimmed wastebasket.
It had been lined with a fresh silk liner.
It was empty.
“Housekeeping emptied the room at five,” Alessandra remarked casually.
“Everything went down the chute.”
“Can we please end this humiliating circus and go back downstairs?”
I stepped past Silas, ignoring the terrifying glare Alessandra shot me.
“Excuse me, Mr. Romano.”
I leaned over the marble sink, staring into the dark mirrored depth of the recessed cabinet.
Something didn't fit.
The linen towels on the third shelf were stacked neatly, but the third stack from the left was pushed slightly forward, out of alignment by half an inch.
Donna Carmela’s head housekeeper, Mrs. Gable, was obsessive about symmetry.
She would never leave a stack of Egyptian cotton towels crooked.
I reached out my hand.
Alessandra lunged forward, her long nails digging violently into the flesh of my right forearm.
“Stop touching her things, you peasant!”
“Let go of her arm,” Matteo said.
The tone was so quiet, so deadly, that Alessandra instantly recoiled, releasing her grip.
A bright red scratch blossomed across my skin, but I didn't care.
I reached behind the stack of white bath towels on the third shelf.
My fingertips brushed against smooth, crinkled plastic.
I hooked my fingers around it and pulled.
It was a small, white paper bag from a compounding pharmacy in Cicero.
The top of the bag had been hurriedly folded over and tucked into the dark crevice between the cabinet wall and the towels.
I set the bag down on the marble vanity counter.
Matteo took a step forward, his eyes burning into the paper.
He reached inside.
The first item he pulled out was the original blue-labeled prescription bottle from Northwestern Outpatient Pharmacy.
Matteo tilted it against the bright vanity light.
Through the translucent blue plastic, tiny white pills were clearly visible.
Matteo popped the child-resistant safety cap and spilled the contents into his palm.
He counted them with his forefinger.
One.
Two.
Three.
All the way to eleven.
Exactly eleven tablets.
Alessandra’s chest hitched.
She took an instinctive half-step backward toward the hallway, but Silas was already standing in the doorway, his massive frame blocking the only exit.
“Eleven tablets,” Matteo whispered, his voice dangerously soft.
“Just as Claire said.”
He didn't stop there.
His hand plunged back into the small Cicero pharmacy bag.
When his hand emerged, he was holding a second amber bottle.
This one was twice the size.
Inside were large, chalky white oblong tablets.
Matteo turned the label to read the printed black text.
His eyebrows pulled together into a severe, lethal frown.
The label did not bear the name of Carmela Romano.
The label was written for an entirely different person.
It read: Evelyn Vale.
The prescription was for concentrated digitalis combined with high-potency beta-blockers, dated three weeks ago.
Matteo looked up from the bottle, his gaze fixing on his fiancée with the precision of an executioner.
“Who is Evelyn Vale, Alessandra?”
Alessandra pressed her back against the doorframe, her throat working convulsively.
“It’s... it’s my aunt.”
“She was staying at my apartment last month.”
“I accidentally grabbed her bag when I moved some of my toiletries here yesterday.”
“It was an honest mistake, Matteo.”
“I swear on my father’s grave, it was just an accident!”
Before Matteo could reply, a soft, raspy sound broke the room’s freezing silence.
It was Donna Carmela.
The old woman had wheeled herself closer to the vanity counter, her gaze locked onto the name printed on the second bottle.
Her silver hair seemed to glow against the harsh bathroom lighting.
Her eyes, usually clouded with age, were suddenly burning with a chilling, long-buried terror.
“Evelyn Vale,” Donna Carmela whispered, her dry lips trembling as she pointed a shaking finger at the bottle.
“Ma?” Matteo said, his voice instantly dropping to a gentle hush.
“Do you know this name?”
Donna Carmela looked up at her son, tears spilling over the deep wrinkles of her weathered cheeks.
“That was the woman, Matteo.”
“The woman your father brought into this house two years ago.”
“The woman Alessandra introduced as a private night nurse.”
May you like
Donna Carmela’s breath broke into a ragged sob as she stared straight through Alessandra’s terrified eyes.
“That was the woman who was whispering in the dark outside your father’s bedroom the night his heart stopped beating.”
