The sommelier’s presentation.
The familiar tasting ritual.
Everything appeared perfectly ordinary.
Except it wasn’t.
The wine had been poisoned.
And someone had apparently expected the evening to proceed without anyone noticing.
Men like Dominic didn’t become targets by accident.
A poisoned drink could turn an elegant dinner into what looked like a sudden medical tragedy.
But that evening had already gone off-script.
And in the chaos, something was noticed before it was too late.
I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d witnessed.
The false annotation.
The poisoned wine.
The possibility that someone had carefully planned both.
I had walked into that restaurant as a waitress struggling to pay her family’s bills.
Now I was a witness to something far more dangerous.
And Dominic Rinaldi wasn’t the kind of man who simply forgot what someone knew.
Especially when that person might be the only one who could expose what happened at his table.
It began with a single sheet of paper.
One of the attorneys dropped it while rearranging a folder beside his plate.
I bent to retrieve it.
“Leave that,” Celeste snapped.
My fingers stopped just above the carpet.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I was only trying to help.”
She turned toward her husband.
“Dominic, can you please tell the staff to stop hovering over us?”
Dominic didn’t answer.
He was reviewing a document on a tablet while Arthur Keene, his longtime outside attorney, explained the terms of a proposed investment.
I picked up the fallen paper by its corner and placed it beside Arthur’s folder.
That was when I saw the Italian annotation.
