Chapter 2 - The Taste of Betrayal
The heavy silence stretched between Lorenzo and the new glass of wine.
He felt the eyes of three hundred guests bearing down on him, waiting for the groom to drink to his bride.
Lorenzo raised the glass high, forcing a brilliant, arrogant smile onto his face.
"To the future," he announced loudly, his deep voice carrying over the string quartet.
The room erupted into applause, and Serena’s tense shoulders finally relaxed.
Lorenzo brought the rim to his lips and tipped his head back.
He let the liquid wash over his tongue, but he did not swallow a single drop.
Under the cover of a gentleman’s polite cough, he brought a heavy linen napkin to his mouth and expelled the wine into the fabric.
He wiped his mouth slowly, tucking the stained napkin deep into his jacket pocket.
"Delicious," he told Serena, looking directly into her calculating eyes.
He needed to find the maid, Maria, and he needed to do it without raising suspicion.
Excusing himself to greet the Chicago dons, Lorenzo carefully navigated the labyrinth of his own party.
His hearing was already fading in his left ear, a dull ringing replacing the beautiful music of the ballroom.
The poison from the past four months was already in his system, eating away at his nerves.
He slipped through a concealed servant’s door hidden behind a grand tapestry.
The kitchen corridors were chaotic, but he found Maria standing near the pantry, holding her silent son.
Maria froze when she saw the Don of the Duca family enter the servant quarters.
"Your son," Lorenzo said softly, making sure no one else was listening.
"He saw something tonight, Maria, and I need to know exactly what he saw."
Maria trembled, pulling the boy closer to her chest as tears welled in her eyes.
"I am so sorry, Don Lorenzo," she whispered frantically.
"I saw her do it, but I was too terrified to speak."
Maria confessed that she had witnessed Serena pouring a clear vial of liquid into Lorenzo's private wine decanter earlier that evening.
Lorenzo’s heart pounded as the reality of his fiancée's betrayal settled into his bones.
He reached into his pocket to hand Maria a stack of cash to keep her quiet, but his fingers brushed against something else.
It was the stained napkin he had used to fake drinking the wine.
The white linen was burning.
A thick, acrid smoke was rising from his pocket, singeing the wool of his expensive suit.
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Whatever Serena had put in the second glass was not a slow nerve toxin.
It was an industrial-grade corrosive acid designed to burn his throat from the inside out.
