Chapter 4

I stood where I was, watching their retreating backs, and let out a long, heavy breath.

Lorenzo Valente, a ranking Capo of the Valente Family whom I knew well, pressed a glass of dark amaro into my hand, his meaning unmistakable. He tapped his signet ring twice against the edge of the bar before he spoke.

"A talent like you, Signorina Moretti, shouldn't have to swallow accusations that carry no weight. There will always be a seat at the Valente table for you."

For some reason, an image of Marco at twenty flashed before my eyes.

A young man brimming with spirit, unflinching even as his crew teetered on the edge of being swallowed whole by stronger Families.

His gaze had been resolute as he pointed toward the tallest tower standing over the territory.

"Adriana, I swear I'll drag the Delgado name back to where every Family in the city has to look up at it."

He'd done it. But somewhere along the way he'd become a stranger to me.

He couldn't tell right from wrong anymore, and he'd lost the right to stand at my side.

I took out my phone and sent my father a message.

【Sever the pact with the Delgado crew next week. I'll announce it myself, at the sit-down.】

The formal sit-down to seal the pact with the Valente Family was set in the Delgado social club, every camera and every witness turned toward the head of the room.

I went over the order of things and every clause of the arrangement down to the last word, making certain nothing could slip.

This was my last piece of work under Marco's roof. I would see it through to a clean finish.

Marco and Gianna arrived together.

Gianna was dressed to the teeth today, draped head to toe in couture, practically wearing the words lady of the house across her face.

The ceremony moved smoothly, right up until the final step, when the sealed terms of the pact were to be thrown onto the wall for the witnesses to read.

Gianna rushed to be the one working the projector.

The next second, a string of filthy photographs flashed across the wall.

The woman in them wore a face identical to mine, bare, tangled up with different men in obscene poses.

The room went dead silent, then broke into an uproar. Somewhere behind me a glass was set down too hard.

Gianna sobbed in feigned panic. "I pressed the wrong button, I swear. Adriana, I'm so sorry."

"I had no idea you kept this many private pictures on your machine!"

She looked like she was begging forgiveness, but she was smearing me, driving the lie deep, cementing it for every man in the room that those photos were mine.

And then, at the very end, she put up a forged report.

My name sat there in plain view, the diagnosis a disease too shameful to say aloud.

Gianna drew a sharp breath. "Adriana, I'd been hearing whispers for a while that your bed was a filthy place, but I never dreamed it was true. You're not going to spread that sickness of yours through the whole city, are you?"

She was using a gutter trick like this to burn my name to the ground, to strip me of the one thing that outlives cash in our world. Respect.

The sheer humiliation of it swallowed me whole.

His face like iron, Marco ordered an associate to kill the screen.

But the muttering and the scornful stares around the room stabbed at me like knives.

"Who knew Signorina Moretti was so wild behind closed doors. Fine figure on her too."

"No wonder she rose so fast in the ranks. Turns out she had her own special methods."

"Delgado and his whole crew, disgraced. She really is a slut who climbed on her back."

The sit-down broke up in a hurry. I kept my back straight and walked to my office through the muttering.

I didn't have much of my own here. Most of it was ledgers and work notes.

Calmly, I packed it into a box. There was nothing left in this place worth holding onto.

Then the office door swung open.

Gianna strode in, chin tilted up in triumph.

"Packing up to crawl out already? How does it feel, ruined and disgraced in front of everyone?"

Her finger trailed across the award I kept on my desk.

It was from the season Marco and I dragged the crew back from the brink, when we'd been named the ones to watch in the whole territory,

the honor we'd earned together with our own hands.

He'd insisted my name be cut into it beside his, saying half of it belonged to me.

Gianna lifted the crystal, a vicious smile curling her lips.

"You still keep this piece of trash? Don't tell me you're praying it'll soften my darling Marco with a little nostalgia."

As she spoke, she made a show of raising it high to shatter it against the floor.

My pupils shrank, and I stepped forward on instinct to stop her.

"Put it down. Marco and I are nothing but old partners——"

Instead she swung the crystal up and slammed it hard into my forehead.

Pain tore through my temple, and warm blood blurred my vision in an instant.

When Marco rushed in at the noise, Gianna was crumpled on the floor, wailing. Her hand fluttered up to her own cheek, and a laugh caught in her throat half a beat too fast before the tears came again.

"Marco, Adriana said I made a fool of her, and she went crazy, tried to teach me a lesson with her own hands."

Marco seemed not to see the ugly gash split across my head or the blood still running down my face. He rounded on me. His hand went to the back of his neck, and he rubbed it slow, his eyes sliding away from mine.

"Adriana, what are you pulling now? Haven't you made enough of a spectacle today? You'll report to the back rooms tomorrow, scrubbing floors. It's about time you learned your place."

"The Family isn't short on talent these days. Don't go thinking the whole thing falls apart without you."

Even disappointment had gone numb in me. I smoothed the fabric over my wrist once, slow and deliberate, and my face was very calm as I spoke.

"No need to trouble yourself, Don Delgado. I'm walking away. I wish you and Signorina Russo a long and happy life together."

With that, I lifted the box and walked out of the house I'd poured five years into, without a single glance back.

The one thing that had always set Marco and me apart

was that I would never let some hollow, fleeting feeling get between me and the work.

The next day was the sit-down where the Delgado crew and the Moretti Family were to announce their great alliance before every witness in the territory.

A bandage at my temple, I arrived in a sharply cut suit.

The moment Gianna saw me, she shrieked, "Adriana, how do you still have the nerve to show your face here? Come to beg Marco to take you back?"

She waved at the enforcer beside her. "Throw this cut-loose little tramp out into the street. She has no right to breathe the same air as us."

Just then my father came in, ringed by newsmen and the ranking men of the Family, and the room bent around him the way water bends around a stone. Conversations died. Men who had been lounging straightened where they stood.

Gianna forced out a fawning smile on instinct. "Don Hart——"

Before she could finish, under her stunned stare, my father smiled and held out his hand to me.

"Let me present to all of you my daughter, Adriana. My blood-heir. She will be taking her place as head of the Moretti Syndicate."