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That anxiety clenches in my stomach again, and I take another small sip of the sake, picking up the jade chopsticks by my plate. “What do you mean?” I ask nervously. “Is this about me getting married?”
My father snorts. “No, Gianna. I’m not marrying you off at eighteen. I want to talk about whether or not you’d like to go to college. We can enroll you for this fall—you can study whatever you’d like. It’s up to you. I can hire another private tutor to teach you at home, but I thought you might like the experience of going to the campus to learn. You’ll have security with you, and you’ll still live at home, of course, but—”
“I would love that.” The idea is a little bit of a nerve wracking one, but new and exciting all the same, and I feel my heart leap in my chest at the thought. “Maybe I could study literature?” The possibilities are thrilling, and I look at my father, waiting to see his reaction.
“You don’t have to decide tonight,” he says, chuckling. “Just think about it, and we’ll discuss it later.” His expression turns a little more serious then, and he sits back, looking at me. “You will have to be married eventually,” he says quietly. “But I think there’s plenty of time for that. And we don’t need to talk about it just yet.”
Not just yet is good enough for me, for now. The rest of the dinner is relaxing and fun, the two of us talking about lighter things—about what I want to do for the summer, the possibility of a vacation, my father admitting he works too much. We eat far too much food and still split dessert, and on the way home, I can see that he’s tired. It must have been a long day for him, with all of the meetings, and once we’re home and back inside, he gives me a smile.
“I’m going to retire early, I think,” he says. “Good night,tesoro.”
“Good night.” I go up on my tiptoes, giving him a hug and another kiss on the cheek, and then go upstairs. I’m tired too, thoroughly relaxed from the day at the spa and full of sake and expensive sushi. I go through the motions of getting ready for bed, washing my face, and slipping into my favorite pair of pajamas before getting into bed and reaching for a book.
I read for an hour or so before I can’t keep my eyes open any longer, switching out the light. I’m almost asleep when I hear a sudden noise downstairs, something that almost sounds like a cry of pain, and then a heavy thud—like something falling.
I sit half-upright, unsure if I was dreaming or not. The cry could have been an animal outside—a cat that wandered through the fence, maybe, or a bird. But the sound—
I had thought it was only a dream. But I hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that something was wrong, even as I lay back down. I shouldn’t have been afraid in my own house, but as I’d finally gotten up, padding across the bedroom and into the hall, all I can remember feeling was an awful, cold knot of fear deep in my stomach. Something had felt wrong from the moment I started down the stairs.
I remember trying the master suite first. I could see that my father hadn’t gone to bed yet—the king-sized bed was neatly made up, his slippers at the edge of it, the room quiet and dark.
I thought of going back to bed then. But every instinct in me screamed to go downstairs, the same instinct that warned me not to turn on a light when I went down, finding the lower part of the house dark—except for my father’s study, where the door was cracked open, buttery warm light spilling out.
I told myself it was nothing. That the sound had been a book dropping. A stubbed toe. That I would walk in and see him in front of the fireplace with a glass of port and a cigar.
When I pushed the door open, I did see him in front of the fireplace. But he wasn’t sitting in the leather wing chair he loved so much, or holding a glass of wine, or smoking one of his favorite cigars. He was—
Sitting in the shower, I rub my hands over my face, hard enough to hurt, seeing the last of the blood wash off of my hands and down the drain. I want to wipe away the memory, the sigh of my father facedown on the hardwood, one hand outstretched in front of him as if reaching for something, the table next to the chair overturned with a shattered glass next to it, wine mingling with the blood slowly leaking over the floor. I want to forget the sound of my own scream as I saw him, the way I collapsed to the floor, the smell of blood that I know I’ll recognize all my life now.
I don’t know what happens next. But I know that my life as I knew it—my life as the beloved daughter of Don Giacomo Mancini, is over.
Who I’m meant to be now, I have no idea.
Alessio
My day so far has been utterly exhausting. When my phone buzzes with a message letting me know that my boss, Luca Romano, wants to see me, I know that it’s not about to get any less so. In fact, at this late hour of the afternoon, it likely means that something has come up that’s going to keep me here later than I want to be, instead of heading straight for my favorite vintage whiskey bar and the company of one of the handful of girls that I can rely on to meet me there for a date and filthy sex later.
Which is how I’d prefer to spend my evening—andhasbeen how I’ve spent them more often than not, recently.
Things have been calm in New York’s criminal underworld for a while now. With the alliance between Luca and Viktor Andreyev—the leader of the Bratva here—and their mutual alliance with the Irish Kings in Boston to back it up, as well as the deals they’ve made with the Santiago cartel in Mexico, business is booming, and no one has the balls to make any challenges to their authority. All that makes my job relatively easy—except for days like today, when I’ve had to deal with shipment issues, a crew that doesn’t seem to understand their expectations, and the need to chastise the man who was in charge of hiring them. It’s all unexciting and tiresome, and as I close the ledger and tuck my phone in my pocket to go and meet Luca in his office one floor up, I find myself hoping that whatever he needs, it won’t take very long.
The grave look on his face when I walk into the office tells me that it’s likely going to be otherwise.
“Sit down, Alessio.” Luca motions to one of the leather chairs in front of his desk, leaning back in his own. “I have news that you’re not going to like to hear.”
I sit down, not bothering to hide my tired sigh. Luca is my employer, but also my friend, and has been for a long time now. As his right-hand man, I know everything—or very nearly everything—that he does, and he trusts me more than anyone else in his employ. If he’s a bit more distant at times than others, I can understand it—the man who was his right-hand once upon a time betrayed him horribly, a betrayal as deep as if it had come from a brother.
“I don’t know of an easy way to say this.” Luca rubs his hand over his mouth, his expression grim. “Don Mancini—your stepfather…he’s dead, Alessio.”
It takes a moment for the words to sink in. “Dead?” I blink at Luca, unable to fully take it in. “He can’t be. He—”
I suck in a breath. “I haven’t talked to him in some time, but the last I knew, he was in good health. What could have happened?” There’s any number of things, of course, but Giacomo wasn’t that old—in his late fifties. He should have had plenty of life left to live, even with the stresses and pressures of being the head of the Chicago mafia.
“It wasn’t natural.” Luca runs a hand through his hair. “His daughter found him. Dead, in the middle of the night, bleeding out from a slit throat in his study. The window was open. Someone attacked him in his home, and escaped.”
“And they’ve been apprehended?” I lean forward. “Surely Vasilev and McNeil are helping with this? They were his allies, after all. And the Family?”
“All looking into it,” Luca says tiredly. “But no, nothing has been found yet. Whoever it was planned well and covered their tracks well.”
