Chapter 3 - Breakfast with the Devil
At 6:55 AM, Rosie pushed a heavy silver room-service cart down the silent, carpeted hallway of the tenth floor.
Her eyes were dark-rimmed from lack of sleep. She had spent the entire night cross-referencing the hotel's inventory receipts with the dock camera timestamps. What she had found was disturbing: three separate shipments marked as "linen deliveries" had bypassed the central registry between 2:00 AM and 4:00 AM over the past fortnight.
She stopped outside Suite 1001—the Presidential Suite.
Taking a deep, steadying breath, she smoothed down her uniform blazer, knocked three times, and waited.
The door opened almost instantly.
Rosie’s breath hitched in her throat.
Lorenzo stood in the doorway, entirely unbothered by her presence. He wore low-slung black trousers and an unbuttoned white linen shirt, revealing a broad, muscular chest covered in dark hair and crisscrossed by a few faint, pale scars. His hair was damp from a recent shower, falling naturally over his forehead.
"You're five minutes early," Lorenzo said, stepping aside to let her in.
"Punctuality is a virtue, Mr. Bianca," Rosie replied, pushing the silver cart into the opulent suite. The room was breathtaking, featuring floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Lake Michigan, bathed in the soft gold of the rising sun.
"Call me Lorenzo. We're partners now, aren't we?"
Rosie stopped the cart near the dining table and turned to face him. "We are not partners. I looked at the files your underboss gave me because I don't like people sabotaging my hotel."
"Our hotel," Lorenzo corrected smoothly, walking over to the window. He poured himself a cup of black coffee from the silver pot on the cart. "And what did your sharp mind discover, Rosie?"
Rosie pulled a folded piece of paper from her pocket and handed it to him. "The missing cargo wasn't taken out of the building. It was stored in the old wine cellars beneath the sub-basement—the ones sealed off after the prohibition era. The current hotel management marked those rooms as structurally unsound, but the power usage logs show a steady pull of refrigeration energy."
Lorenzo paused, his coffee cup halfway to his mouth. Slowly, he turned his gaze toward her. A slow, genuine expression of respect warmed his features.
"You found that in one night?"
"It wasn't hard if you know how to read utility reports instead of just staring at security cameras," Rosie said, a small note of pride slipping into her tone. "Your two million dollars in contraband—whatever it is—is sitting fifty feet beneath our feet."
Lorenzo set his cup down and walked toward her. The casual lightness in his posture evaporated, replaced by an intense, overwhelming focus. He stopped inches from her, forcing Rosie to tilt her head back to look into his dark eyes.
"You are incredible," Lorenzo murmured, his voice dropping an octave.
Rosie’s heart did a strange, violent flip in her chest. She wasn't used to men looking at her like this—not with such raw, undivided admiration. "I'm just good at my job."
"No," Lorenzo said softly, reaching out. His fingers brushed lightly against the side of her jaw, his thumb tracing her cheekbone. His touch was surprisingly gentle for a man whose hands ordered violence. "You are intelligent, fearless, and breathtakingly competent. Most people in my world scream when they see a shadow. You walk into the dark and turn on the lights."
Rosie felt her breath catch. Her skin tingled where he touched her. "Lorenzo... I'm a hotel manager. You're..."
"A man who knows the value of something rare," he interrupted quietly.
Before Rosie could respond, the heavy suite door burst open. Mateo rushed in, his face tense, his phone pressed to his ear.
"Lorenzo, we have a problem," Mateo said urgently, ignoring Rosie's presence. "The Moretti family just landed a private chopper at Midway. Dominic Moretti himself is on his way here. He called a sit-down for noon."
Lorenzo’s face hardened instantly, the warmth vanishing like a candle blown out in a gale. "Dominic knows about the cellars?"
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"He knows his stolen goods are trapped there," Mateo said. "He's coming to demand them back—or start a war in the middle of the Drake."
Lorenzo looked back at Rosie, his eyes dark and resolute. "It seems our afternoon just became very complicated, Miss Hastings."
