Chapter 2 - The Weight of the Amaretto
The sun rises over Providence like a bruise, spreading shades of purple and sickly yellow across the wet cobblestones of Federal Hill. Maeve hasn't slept. She sits at the small wooden table in her apartment above the bakery, the small glass vial sitting in the exact center of the scarred surface.
She has looked at it for four hours. She has picked it up, turned it over, felt its weight—scarcely two ounces of death packaged in laboratory glass. Callum is asleep on the pull-out couch in the corner, his breathing heavy and rattling, bruised ribs rising and falling with each labored inhalation. Falcone’s men left him in the alley behind the shop at 3:00 a.m., a parting gift to remind her that the clock is running.
By 6:00 a.m., Maeve is downstairs.
She turns on the ovens. The familiar hum of the gas burners fills the quiet room, drowning out the rattling of the broken front window, which has been temporarily boarded up with sheets of heavy plywood by an emergency carpenter Enzo sent before dawn.
As she measures the flour, her hands don't shake. That is the terrifying part. Seven years of muscle memory take over. Two cups pastry flour. One teaspoon baking powder. A pinch of Kosher salt. She separates twelve eggs, whipping the whites into stiff, glossy peaks that catch the morning light. She grinds the marcona almonds until they are fine as silt, folding them gently into the batter with a rubber spatula that scrapes the ceramic bowl with a soft, rhythmic shhh-shhh.
At 1:00 p.m., the torte comes out of the oven. It rises perfectly—golden, domed, smelling of roasted nuts and butter.
She sets it on the wire rack to cool.
Then she begins the amaretto cream.
Whipping heavy cream requires patience. It needs to reach soft peaks before you introduce the sugar, the Madagascar vanilla bean paste, and the dark, bitter Italian liqueur that gives it its signature bite. Maeve stands over the stainless-steel bowl, the electric whisk buzzing in her hand, watching the white billows rise.
She reaches into her apron pocket. Her fingers wrap around the glass vial.
If she pours it in, Julian Castellane eats a slice of cake at eight o'clock tonight, feels a sudden shortness of breath around eight-twenty, and is declared dead of a massive coronary by eight-thirty. Her brother is free. They go to Lisbon. A hundred thousand dollars waits in a bank account she hasn't opened yet.
If she doesn't pour it in, Falcone’s men come back. They will finish what they started in the alley, and this time, there will be no warning shot.
She holds the vial over the bowl of cream. The clear liquid inside laps lazily against the glass wall.
"Maeve?"
She jumps so hard a drop of cream splashes onto the counter.
Callum is standing in the doorway, pale, wearing a sweatshirt two sizes too big, holding a compress of ice against his swollen cheekbone. His eyes are wide, haunted, looking at her with a desperate, pathetic plea.
"Did you... did you do it?" he whispers.
Maeve looks at her brother—the boy she raised after their mother died, the boy who promised a hundred times he was done with the tables, the boy who has now traded her soul for a roll of the dice.
"Get out of the kitchen, Callum," she says, her voice flat as a frozen pond.
"Maeve, please. Falcone—he’s not like the local guys. He owns half the judges in the county. If you don't do it, they'll kill us both. I swear to God, they won't even blink."
"I told you to get out."
He lingers for a second, looking from her face to the vial in her hand, then retreats into the bakery proper, dragging his feet like a condemned man.
Maeve stares down at the amaretto cream.
She pulls the cork from the vial. The smell rises—sharp, chemical, completely odorless against the rich sweetness of the cream, but she knows it's there.
She tilts the glass.
Three drops fall into the bowl.
Just three drops. Not the whole vial. Just enough to simulate the early stages of distress, just enough to make a strong man dizzy, to force a medical interruption without stopping a heart. It is a gamble, a desperate, razor-thin sliver of a chance, but it is the only way she can think of to cheat a butcher without getting her own hands entirely stained in blood.
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She beats the cream until the drops are thoroughly, invisibly integrated. She frosts the torte, dusts it with toasted almond flakes, and places it inside a heavy cardboard bakery box tied with red twine.
At 4:00 p.m., a black town car idling at the curb picks up the box. Maeve watches from the broken window as it pulls away into the gray Providence afternoon, carrying her poison straight to the doorstep of the most dangerous man in New England.
