“I’ll Give You $10M If You Translate This”, Laughed The Mafia Boss… But The Shy Waitress Silenced…
The Ghost of Table 10
$10 million, that was the price tag on my silence. It started as a joke, a cruel, arrogant boast shouted by the most dangerous man in New York.
Dante Valerio, the Capo who ruled the city with a blooded iron fist, thought I was just a waitress. He thought I was invisible.
He threw a crumbling, ancient letter onto the table and laughed, daring anyone to decipher the code that had baffled the world’s best cryptographers. He didn’t know who I really was.
He didn’t know that by reading those three lines, I wasn’t just winning a bet. I was signing my own death warrant.
The air in Loro always smelled of truffle oil, expensive cologne, and fear. Mostly fear.
Selene adjusted the collar of her stiff white uniform, keeping her head down as she navigated the maze of velvet booths. She was a ghost in this restaurant.
That was the point. Being Selene the waitress was safe.
Being Dr. Selene Rostova, the youngest linguistics professor to ever be disgraced and exiled from Cambridge University, was dangerous. Here, amidst the clinking of crystal and the murmur of high society gossip, she was invisible until tonight.
A Dangerous Bet
Tonight, table 10 was occupied by Dante Valerio. Even without looking up, Selene knew he was there.
The atmosphere in the restaurant had shifted the moment he walked in. The music seemed quieter.
The other diners stiffened, and the manager, Mr. Henderson, was sweating through his suit. Dante Valerio wasn’t just a mob boss; he was the head of the Valerio syndicate.
He was a man whose net worth was rumored to rival small countries and whose temper was legendary.
“Incompetent, all of you!”
The shout shattered the polite hum of the room. Selene froze near the service station, gripping a pitcher of water.
At table 10, Dante stood up, slamming his hand onto the mahogany surface. He was devastatingly handsome, with dark hair slicked back, a jawline that could cut glass, and eyes the color of a stormy sea.
But the rage radiating off him was terrifying. Two men in dark suits, his bodyguards, flinched.
Sitting across from Dante was a terrified elderly man in a tweed jacket, looking like a librarian who had taken a wrong turn into a shark tank.
“I pay you $50,000,”
Dante hissed, his voice dropping to a lethal baritone.
“And you tell me it’s gibberish.”
“Mr. Valerio, please,”
the old man stammered, adjusting his glasses with trembling fingers.
“It is an archaic dialect, a mix of Sicilian and something pre-Roman. The syntax makes no sense. It’s unreadable.”
“Get him out of my sight before I cut his tongue out,”
Dante growled. His guards dragged the whimpering translator away.
Dante fell back into his chair, running a hand over his face. He reached into his inner jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of yellowed, fragile parchment.
He stared at it with a mix of hatred and desperation. Selene watched, mesmerized.
She knew she should look away, but the pattern of the ink on the paper caught her eye even from ten feet away. It wasn’t just a letter; it was a cipher.
“More wine, sir?”
Selene jumped. Mr. Henderson shoved a bottle of the 1982 Chateau Margaux into her hands.
“Table 10. Go, and for God’s sake, don’t make eye contact.”
Into the Lion’s Den
Selene took a breath, steeling her nerves. She walked toward the lion’s den.
As she approached, she heard Dante muttering to his right-hand man, a scarred giant named Luca.
“If I don’t decipher this by Friday, the commission will vote me out, Luca. My father left the location of the reserves in this note. I know it. Without that money, the Valerio family is dead.”
“We’ll find another expert, boss,”
Luca said.
“There are no experts left,”
Dante snapped. He grabbed his glass, draining the whiskey.
He looked up, his eyes locking onto the parchment, ignoring Selene as she began to pour the wine.
“I’d give 10 million right now to the person who could tell me what this damn thing says.”
Dante said, his voice loud, carrying across the silent restaurant. He looked around the room, his lip curling in a sneer.
He was mocking the world, mocking his own desperation.
“10 million. Any takers? No? Just a room full of cowards and sheep.”
Selene’s hand hovered over his glass. Her eyes traced the script on the table.
It wasn’t just Sicilian; it was a variation of Oscan, an extinct Italic language, overlaid with a Vigenère cipher. It was complex, brilliant, and solvable.
She saw the pattern immediately. The recurring symbols weren’t letters; they were coordinates masked as vowels.
She poured the wine perfectly, not spilling a drop. But as she pulled away, the words slipped out before she could stop them.
“It’s not gibberish,”
she whispered. The silence that followed was heavy enough to crush bones.
Dante Valerio froze. He turned his head slowly, looking at the waitress standing by his elbow.
He looked at her cheap uniform, her messy bun, and her fraying apron.
“Excuse me?”
he said, his voice dangerously soft. Mr. Henderson rushed forward, pale as a sheet.
“Mr. Valerio, I am so sorry. She is new. She’s an idiot. I’ll have her fired immediately.”
“Quiet,”
Dante commanded, not looking away from Selene. He stood up, towering over her.
“What did you say, little mouse?”
The Traitor’s Blood
Selene’s heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird. She should apologize.
She should run. But the intellectual vanity that had gotten her kicked out of Cambridge flared up.
She couldn’t stand seeing a beautiful puzzle insulted.
“I said it’s not gibberish,”
Selene said, her voice shaking but clear.
“The translator was wrong. It’s not pre-Roman; it’s Oscan. But it’s written backward using a shift cipher based on the Gregorian calendar.”
Dante stared at her. For a second, he looked ready to laugh.
“A waitress?”
he scoffed.
“A waitress knows Oscan?”
“I wasn’t always a waitress,”
Selene murmured. Dante crossed his arms, and the arrogance returned.
“All right, you want to play. You heard the offer: $10 million. Prove it.”
He gestured to the parchment.
“If you’re wrong,”
Dante leaned in, his breath hot against her ear.
“I take the hand you use to pour my wine as payment for wasting my time.”
Mr. Henderson whimpered in the background. Selene looked at the parchment.
She didn’t need to write it down. She had an eidetic memory.
It was the curse that made her brilliant and the burden that made her unable to forget her past mistakes. She scanned the text.
The letters rearranged themselves in her mind. The message wasn’t about money reserves; it was something far more personal and far more dangerous.
“Well?”
Dante pressed. Selene met his gaze, her brown eyes locked with his stormy blue ones.
“It says,”
Selene began, her voice steadying.
“The wolf does not hide the gold in the den. The gold is the blood of the traitor who sits at your right hand.”
The glass in Luca’s hand shattered. Dante didn’t blink.
He didn’t move, but the air around him turned into ice.
“Read the signature,”
Dante whispered.
“It’s signed.”
Selene squinted at the final glyph.
“Amor, Gabriella.”
Dante’s face went pale. Gabriella was his mother, and she had died twenty years ago.
No one knew her pet name for him was “wolf” except his father. Dante looked at Luca.
Luca, the right-hand man, was staring at the table, his hand bleeding from the shattered glass, his face a mask of guilt. The restaurant was deadly silent.
“Clear the room,”
Dante said calmly.
“Boss,”
Luca started.
“Clear the room!”
Dante roared, flipping the heavy oak table.
