I was just a waitress when I overheard a mafia boss’s wife whispering to her lover that they had sabotaged her husband’s brakes. I ran to warn him, but I was seconds too late. By the time I reached the mountain road, his car was already disappearing over the cliff, and I became the only person close enough to pull him back from death.

For the next two weeks, the Moretti estate became a war room.

The death of Marco and the public execution-style purging of three Caporegimes loyal to Vanessa had triggered an open war between the Moretti syndicate and the Marcone family, who controlled the docks and the construction unions in New Jersey.

Every night, black cars arrived at the front gates under armed escort.

Men with scarred faces and heavy leather jackets walked through the marble halls, their voices hushed, their eyes darting nervously toward the second-floor balcony where I was occasionally allowed to sit under Julian’s watchful eye.

I was no longer a prisoner, but I was not a guest either.

I had become something stranger: Dante’s shadow.

Wherever he went within the compound—whether it was the high-tech security room in the basement, the private gun range beneath the stable block, or his personal office on the top floor—I was brought along.

He didn't explain why. He simply commanded me to sit in the corner, to listen, to watch.

"Why do you keep her here, Don?" Julian asked one afternoon while I was sitting at a side table in Dante’s office, reading a book from his extensive library. "The Marcone threat is contained to the waterfront. We could ship her to a safehouse in Maine."

Dante didn't look up from his ledger. "She stays."

"She’s a distraction," Julian pressed, his voice dropping into a razor-thin whisper. "The men are talking. They say you kept a waitress alive because she has a pretty face. They think you've gone soft since the crash."

Dante set his pen down with a slow, deliberate motion.

He looked up at Julian, his grey eyes cold as liquid nitrogen.

"Tell the men," Dante said softly, "that if anyone wants to test how soft I've become, my office door is unlocked every day at three o'clock."

Julian’s jaw tightened, but he bowed his head slightly. "Understood."

"And Julian," Dante added, leaning back in his leather chair. "Bring Miss Fields a glass of white wine. The 2018 Barolo."

Julian turned toward me, his dark eyes narrowed in quiet disgust, but he walked over to the side bar and poured the wine without another word.

When he handed me the glass, his fingers brushed mine, and he leaned down slightly.

"Enjoy it while it lasts, girl," Julian whispered so softly that Dante couldn't hear. "The Don’t last wife thought she was indispensable too. Her funeral is scheduled for Thursday."

My blood went cold.

Vanessa was dead.

I had assumed she was in a safehouse, or a private prison, or deported to Italy. But looking into Julian’s dead brown eyes, I realized the absolute, unyielding reality of the world I had been pulled into: in Dante Moretti’s empire, mistakes were not forgiven, and betrayal was an illness that was cured with lead.

I looked across the room at Dante, who was already back to reviewing his financial ledgers, his pale face illuminated by the green banker's lamp on his desk.

He was a monster. A refined, tailored, exquisitely educated monster who paid my student loans and ordered twenty-thousand-dollar wine for a girl who used to live on leftover pasta from table seven.

And yet, as I watched him lean his head into his hand, a small, involuntary wince crossing his features as his fractured collarbone throbbed beneath his shirt, I felt a strange, terrifying knot tighten in my stomach.