All Chapters of Nanny For The Ruthless Mafia King : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The recruitment office smelled like fresh paint and old money, which Aria Calloway decided was the most honest kind of deception she had ever encountered. She had been to three agencies in the past two weeks. The first had a peel-and-stick motivational quote above the front desk that read Your Dream Job Is Waiting! and a receptionist who chewed gum loudly enough to be heard from the waiting area. The second smelled like burnt coffee and despair. The third, the one she sat in now, had no motivational quotes, a receptionist who smiled without warmth, and carpet so new it left the faint chemical trace of a place trying very hard to look permanent. The name on the glass door was simply: Meridian Placements. Aria had found them through Elena, who had found them through a contact at her law firm who had said, and this was the detail that should have sent Aria home, that the placements paid four times the going rate and required a confidentiality agreement before the first interview.

By the end of the first week, Aria had mapped the house the way she mapped every new place she inhabited: not by its layout but by its silences. Every house had them, the specific places where sound fell away or changed texture, where the architecture itself seemed to hold something. In apartments she had nannied in before, the silences were ordinary things, a quiet hallway, a too-still living room, the particular hush of a child's room after sleep had finally come. In those houses, she walked through the silences and left them behind. In this house, the silences followed her. The east corridor outside the study was silent in a way that felt like waiting. The formal dining room was silent in a way that felt like aftermath. The garden, paradoxically, was the noisiest room in the house, full of birds and the sound of small movement and, twice now, the distant rumble of a gate and then the crunch of tires that meant someone arriving or leaving at an hour that was not a social hour.

Luca spoke on the fourteenth day. It happened without announcement or ceremony, which was the only way it could have happened, and later, when Aria tried to reconstruct the moment, she found she could not remember the exact sentence she had been reading or the precise way the room had been lit, only the quality of the silence before it and the quality of the sound after it and the way those two things were entirely different from each other. They were in Luca's room for the evening reading. It was eight minutes past seven. He was sitting up in bed with his knees drawn up and his drawing portfolio balanced on them, which was a new configuration she had allowed because he had positioned it himself and it gave him something to look at when he wanted to not look at her, and she had learned that having a place to put your eyes that wasn't another person's face was important when you were practicing something. She was three-quarters of the way through the book he had selected, the wel

The file on Marco's desk contained a single highlighted line and Marco read it three times before he called Damien. The call was at eleven-forty at night. Damien answered on the first ring, which meant he had not been sleeping. Marco said: Meridian Placements has a secondary client relationship with a shell company registered in Cyprus that traces to Carrow operations within three degrees. Silence. Then: Her application was flagged by the agency before she submitted it? Six months prior. The flag was automated: her name returned a hit in a database the shell company maintained. The hit was the Calloway connection to the Bellinis. She didn't apply to Meridian, Marco said. Meridian found her. They headhunted her. They engineered the placement, Marco said. The daycare that closed, the funding cuts, Aria lost her job a week after Meridian identified her. I'm still pulling the thread on the funding decision b

The conversation happened at seven in the morning, which was the kind of time conversations happened when someone had been awake all night deciding to have them. She was in the kitchen when he came in, not the purposeful arrival of the previous week but the early quiet arrival of someone who had chosen the earliest moment when they could find her alone. Mrs. Fenn did not come in until seven-thirty on Tuesdays. Luca was asleep until seven. Aria was at the table with her tea and the small private minutes before the day began. Damien came in and sat down across from her. She looked at him. He looked like a man who had slept three hours, which she was learning to distinguish from a man who had slept none, because she had now seen both. He set both hands flat on the table surface and looked at them for a moment. She waited. He said: Your grandfather. Felix Calloway. She felt the sentence in her chest before she understood it.