Chapter 4 - SECRETS IN THE FLOUR SACKS
Clara didn't bring coffee outside. Instead, she grabbed the handles of the wheelchair without asking and pushed him up the wooden ramp, her boots slipping slightly on the salt-scattered planks.
"Inside," she commanded. "Before those animals realize the police in this town don't patrol Main Street anymore."
The interior of the bakery was warm, smelling of caraway seeds, yeast, and ancient brick. Shelves lined with crusty boules, dark rye, and braided challah covered the left wall. At the back, leaning heavily against a stainless steel prep counter, stood Joseph Rossi.
The old baker looked eighty, though Enzo knew from Desmond’s notes he was barely sixty-two. His shoulders were bowed like an old willow, his hands swollen with severe arthritis, and his eyes carried the hollow, hunted look of a man who had spent decades waiting for an executioner.
"Clara," the old man wheezed, clutching his chest. "Who is this? You can't just drag strangers into the shop—"
"He distracted them, Pop," Clara said, parking the wheelchair near the massive cast-iron deck oven. "Or he got lucky. Either way, Pike's thugs left. But they'll be back."
Pike. Enzo filed the name away. Wendell Pike, the contractor from Boston whom Enzo had humiliated four days ago, was from this area. The threads were knotting together.
Joseph Rossi shuffled forward, wiping his hands on a flour-caked towel. He looked down at Enzo, squinting through thick, smudged glasses. The old man stopped three feet away. His breath hitched.
"Your eyes," Joseph whispered.
Enzo kept his voice level, completely devoid of emotion. "What about them?"
"You look like... no. It’s impossible." Joseph shook his head vigorously, as if clearing a fog. "You look like someone I knew thirty years ago. A boy from the coast."
"I'm from everywhere, old man," Enzo said. "Name's Michael."
Joseph gave a slow, mournful sigh and turned back to the oven. "Whoever you are, Michael, thank you. But you shouldn't be here. Nobody should be here. This shop is dead. By next week, the bank takes the deed, the equipment gets auctioned, and Clara and I will be living out of an old station wagon."
"Pop, stop," Clara snapped, her voice breaking despite her effort to sound fierce. "We still have the wedding orders for Saturday. If we deliver the cakes to the country club—"
"The country club canceled an hour ago, Clara!" Joseph shouted, his voice cracking with old, helpless tears. "Vance called them! He told them our flour had weevils! He’s poisoned every customer between here and Charleston. We owe two hundred thousand dollars on a fifty-thousand-dollar mortgage, and there's nobody coming to save us!"
Joseph slumped onto an upturned five-gallon bucket, burying his gray head in his hands.
Clara stood frozen in the middle of the kitchen. Her chin quivered, but she refused to let the tears fall. She turned her back to her father, leaned against the dough mixer, and stared at the floorboards, her breathing ragged and shallow.
Enzo watched them both. In the Falcone family, weakness was an invitation to slaughter. If a captain wept like that in Boston, he would be replaced by midnight. But here, in this flour-dusted room, the grief wasn't cowardly; it was the raw, bleeding exhaustion of decent people crushed beneath a machine they couldn't see.
"How did the debt start?" Enzo asked.
Joseph didn't look up. "Thirty years ago. A hit-and-run on the highway outside town. A black Lincoln with Massachusetts plates ran my wife’s car off the bridge into the ravine. She survived, but her spine was shattered. Medical bills, surgeries, physical therapy... the driver never stopped. Never caught him."
Enzo’s hands, resting casually on the wheels, tightened until the knuckles turned stark white.
A debt there I could spend my whole life repaying and never finish. If you find it, please don't be angry with me.
Desmond. Thirty years ago, Desmond was Marco Falcone’s primary wheelman, running bootleg cigarettes and laundered cash through the mountain passes before Enzo was even old enough to understand the family business.
"A Boston loan agency reached out six months after the accident," Joseph continued, his voice a dull monotone. "Offered me a private loan when the local banks laughed at me. Low rates, they said. Friendly terms. It was a lifeline. But every five years, the agency was sold to a new holding company. The rates tripled. Hidden fees. Balloon payments. I paid back the original fifty thousand four times over, but the principal never shrank. It’s an anchor around my neck, dragging my girl down into the mud with me."
"It's not an anchor," Enzo said, his voice cutting through the bakery like a razor blade. "It's a garrote."
Both Clara and Joseph looked up at him.
"You speak strange for a man with four quarters to his name," Clara murmured, stepping closer to him, her eyes searching his face with intense curiosity. "Who are you, really?"
Before Enzo could answer, the bell above the bakery's front door chimed.
It wasn't the heavy kick of thugs. It was the sharp, confident click of high-end Italian dress shoes on linoleum.
Enzo’s instincts flared red. He slumped instantly back into the wheelchair, dropping his chin toward his chest, letting his mouth hang slightly slack in the dull mimicry of an invalid.
Through the kitchen door's circular glass pane, a man walked into the front shop. He was tall, dressed in a charcoal cashmere coat, with slicked-back silver hair and a diamond pinky ring. Behind him stood two hulking men in tailored suits with bulges under their left armpits.
It was Salvatore Bianchi. Uncle Marco’s right-hand executioner.
"Joseph!" Salvatore’s voice dripped with greasy, synthetic warmth. "Smells wonderful in here! Tell me you have some of those almond biscotti my boss loves so much!"
Joseph went rigid. "Bianchi," he choked out.
Clara grabbed the fire poker again, but Enzo’s hand shot out and caught her wrist. His grip was steel, biting into her skin with impossible strength.
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"Put it down," Enzo whispered, barely moving his lips. "If you raise that, they will kill both of you where you stand."
Clara looked at his hand on her wrist—strong, unyielding, commanding—and for the first time, sheer terror crossed her face. Not because of the men in the front room, but because of the man sitting in the wheelchair.
