Chapter 5 - The Poison in the Well
By week two, Ravenwood Estate ran on an entirely new schedule.
Breakfast was served at 6:00 AM sharp; lunch was laid out at noon; dinner was on the table at 7:00 PM. If you were five minutes late, you ate cold leftovers out of the fridge, and heaven help you if you didn't wash your own plate.
The men had stopped testing me. In fact, a bizarre shift had begun to take root.
It started with Leo, the twitchy twenty-two-year-old kid whose real name was Marco. He had come down with a vicious winter cold that left him shivering during sentry duty on the north perimeter. Instead of letting him survive on energy drinks and painkillers, I dragged him into the kitchen, sat him on a stool, and forced down two bowls of homemade chicken pastina soup simmered with ginger, garlic, and whole leeks.
“Drink the broth, Marco,” I ordered, slapping his hand away when he reached for a cigarette. “Smoke that in here and I’ll use your lighter to burn your eyebrows off.”
He drank it. The next morning, his fever was gone.
Two days later, Marco brought me a heavy wooden crate filled with imported Sicilian olive oil he’d intercepted from a hijacked shipment at the docks. “For the pantry, Ma,” he mumbled, his cheeks turning red before he hurried out the back door.
*Ma.*
The word hung in the kitchen air like the smell of fresh yeast. I stood over that crate of olive oil with a strange, tightening knot in my throat. My own mother had been gone six months, and my life had been hollow ever since. Now, a room full of killers was looking at me like I held the keys to their survival.
Which, as it turned out, I did.
It happened on a Tuesday night. Roman was hosting a meeting in the estate's reinforced subterranean library. Six capos from the New Jersey and New York factions had arrived under heavy security escort. The tension in the house was thick enough to choke on. The guards were pacing the halls with submachine guns held at low ready, and Vincent hadn’t taken his hand off his weapon all afternoon.
At 6:30 PM, a delivery van backed into the service bay carrying three crates of premium strip steaks, supposedly ordered by Roman’s central logistics office in Manhattan.
Dante signed for the delivery and had two recruits haul the boxes into my prep room.
“Boss wants the steaks medium-rare for the guests at eight,” Dante said, wiping sweat from his forehead. “Don't mess this up, Maggie. The New York boys are looking for an excuse to start a war. A bad dinner might just give it to them.”
I cut open the first vacuum-sealed package. The meat looked prime—deep red, beautifully marbled with creamy white fat.
I leaned down to inspect the cuts. Then I stopped.
My mother had grown up on a dairy farm in Lancaster County. She had taught me how meat smells when it’s slaughtered, when it’s aged, and when it’s spoiled. But this meat didn’t smell spoiled.
It smelled faintly, almost imperceptibly, like bitter almonds.
I pulled off my nitrile glove, grabbed a small sliver of the fat from the edge, and held it near the pilot light of the nearest gas range. The fat sizzled, and a thin, acrid vapor rose from the flame.
Potassium cyanide.
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My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. Someone hadn’t just tried to mess up dinner. Someone was trying to wipe out the entire leadership of the Duca syndicate in one course.
***