CHAPTER 1
PIETRO
The first time I saw Emily Hart, she was sitting at my usual table in the library of Hawthorne University, surrounded by a fortress of history books and entirely unaware she had just ruined the order of my afternoon.
I stopped at the end of the aisle and looked at her for a moment.
Wild blonde curls spilled around a bright pink headband that should not have suited her but did. Her glasses kept slipping down her nose, and every few seconds she pushed them back up with an absent motion that told me she was too deep in her work to care how she looked. She was writing in the margin of a thick paperback.
“Would you like me to?—”
I lifted a hand, cutting Olivero off before he could offer whatever idiotic solution he thought I required.
Olivero, my bodyguard, was the only concession I had made to my father. Alessandro Benetti, head of the Chicago outfit, had agreed to let me attend Hawthorne in Boston on two conditions: that I kept security with me and that I stayed on territory controlled by our people. Hawthorne was safe enough, at leastby mafia standards. Few of the students wandering these halls had any idea just how carefully protected this place really was.
Summer term made the campus quieter than it would be in September, but not empty. Hawthorne never truly slept. There were always graduate students haunting the library, professors guarding their research time, and undergraduates trying to convince themselves accelerated classes had been a wise choice.
My gaze drifted back to the woman at my table.
I wasn’t arrogant enough to assume the world moved around me, but that table had been mine since the beginning of the semester. Routine mattered. I liked the same seat, the same light, the same silence. Control made things easier on days when my body insisted on reminding me of its limits.
My grip tightened around the cool silver handle of my cane.
I had spent my whole life making sure no one mistook those limits for weakness.
And yet, as I stood there watching a stranger bury herself in Renaissance warfare with no idea she was wrecking the order of my afternoon, weakness was not what I felt.
It was irritation.
Curiosity.
And something far more inconvenient.
I wasn’t the type to socialize, not here. I was here to finish my degree and step fully into the life I had been born to. By December, once my final summer and fall credits were done, I would officially become my father’s sotto capo.
It was legacy, obligation, and expectation braided so tightly together I had stopped bothering to separate them.
I knew any connection formed within these walls would be temporary at best, and I had never been interested in offering more than polite acknowledgment.
The woman sitting at my table should have meant nothing.
And yet I found myself standing there, looking at her longer than necessary.
At last, she seemed to feel it. Her head lifted, and a pair of clear blue eyes met mine through oversized glasses that had slipped halfway down her nose.
She blinked once, then glanced at the books spread around her, and back at me.
“Sorry,” she said, her voice soft but steady. “Were you heading here? I can move.”
No fluster. No rambling apology. No awkwardness.
Just a simple offer.
“Don’t bother.”
Something flickered across her face. Surprise, maybe, though it vanished quickly.
“There’s enough room if you still want it,” she said, gathering a few loose sheets into a neater pile. “I sort of exploded.”
