Chapter 4

"Next time," he said, lifting Gemma into his arms and glaring down at me, "you won't get off so easily."

I clenched my fists.

For the next week, the whispers running through every social club and gala in Calderone territory carried the same story: Salvatore, seen everywhere with Gemma on his arm, spending like a man who wanted the whole city to know.

I pretended not to notice.

Late at night, while going over the Bellucci ledgers alone in the back office of our laundering front, the door burst open under a heavy boot.

Before I could even look up, a cold hand wrapped around my throat.

Gemma dropped to her knees, tears in her voice. "Signorina Bellucci, my parents are just simple people! Please, have mercy!"

She held up her phone. On the screen, a bloodied middle-aged couple knelt on a bare floor, foreheads pressed to concrete before the camera.

"Signorina Bellucci! Please forgive us! Our daughter would never dare stand against you over Don Calderone's heir!"

Salvatore snatched the phone, eyes blazing.

"Adriana! You've gone insane! You actually sent soldiers to break Gemma's parents?!"

"I don't even know them." I stared at Gemma coldly. "That's quite the performance."

"Still denying it?" Salvatore slammed the phone down on the desk. On screen, the couple began striking their own faces. "They called your name while they begged!"

I took a steady breath. "I didn't do this."

Gemma lunged forward and grabbed my wrist. "Signorina Bellucci, my parents are still in the clinic! They've lived honest lives, they've never touched this world. How could they…"

"Enough!" I flung her hand off. "If you want to set me up, at least make it a story someone would believe."

"You disgust me, Adriana," Salvatore said, cold as a blade laid flat. He straightened his watch and shot his cuffs, that small, vain little reset he always made before the cruelty came. "If you truly wanted to be my woman, you wouldn't stoop to something so vile."

"Take her away!"

Four enforcers surrounded me in an instant, wrenching my arms back with brutal force.

I was dragged out while Gemma wept behind me. "Don Calderone… my parents…"

They threw me down onto the cold marble of the Calderone chapel, the family's private hall of saints and dead men, and my knees split against the stone.

Salvatore tossed a document at my feet. A transfer of tribute rights, control of the Bellucci rackets. "Sign it. Eighty percent. Signed over to Gemma."

"Not a chance." I clenched my jaw. "Over my dead body."

Gemma put on her wounded little mask. "Don Calderone, the Signorina always looked down on people like me… perhaps this is only fair?"

Salvatore slammed me against the floor. "Weren't you ruthless enough to have someone's parents broken?"

He pried my fingers open and forced them onto the inkpad. "Sign it. Tonight. Whether you want to or not."

They locked me inside the chapel. Three days passed before the doors finally opened.

I thought I was being let go. Instead, Gemma came through them alone.

"Don Calderone says you can leave," she said, her voice echoing in the quiet hall beneath the painted eyes of dead saints.

I lifted my head weakly, only to meet her bitter glare. She calmly untied the ropes. Then, without warning, she shoved me back to the ground.

A harsh, stinging odor filled my nostrils. Gasoline.

"What are you doing?!" I gasped, eyes wide as she flicked a lighter. My voice trembled.

She smirked. Her tears had already dried, stopped clean like a shut faucet, and for half a second her face went flat and calculating before the next mask slid into place. "Shouldn't the Signorina have disappeared by now? Let me make it quick, so you'll finally stop clinging to Don Calderone."

The moment the lighter hit the floor, flames leapt to life. I let out a gut-wrenching scream, loud enough to carry through the walls, loud enough for Salvatore to hear from outside.

"What's happening?!" He ran in, frozen by the inferno tearing up the chapel before him.

Gemma spun toward him. "Don Calderone! She said if she can't have you, she'll destroy you! She's trying to burn down your family's own chapel!"

Salvatore's furious roar cut through the flames.

"Put it out! What are you all standing there for?!"

The fire climbed higher, the heat warping the air, the painted saints blistering above me.

Then the ground itself began to shake. Several armored vehicles smashed through the Calderone gates, engines roaring, iron folding like paper.

Through the smoke, a man came forward, his black coat already singed by the flames. Behind him, two lines of heavily armed soldiers moved through the courtyard with the silence of men who had done this before, seizing every corner in seconds.

His voice was ice-cold. "Where's Adriana?"

Salvatore's face twisted. "Why you?"

The man didn't spare him a glance. He walked straight into the fire. His men moved with precision around him, smothering the flames in moments.

He came back out with me in his arms.

Blood smeared the fine cloth of his suit, but he held me as if I were made of glass.