Chapter 2
“I had to protect her, Alessandro,” Rosa whispered, tears finally breaking free and spilling down her cheeks. “If Vincent Romano or any of your rivals had discovered that you fathered a child outside of a strategic syndicate alliance, they would have hunted us down before she took her first breath. I came here because the safest place to hide from the devil is directly beneath his shadow.”
Alessandro did not yell. He did not rage. He slowly lowered himself back onto one knee, gently reaching out to touch the soft curls of his daughter’s dark hair. For thirty-eight years, Alessandro Moretti had believed his heart was carved from the same cold granite as his father’s estate. But looking at Lily sleeping peacefully against Rosa’s chest, he realized that a part of him had recognized her the very first day she sat in the hallway.
“You should have trusted me, Rosa,” Alessandro said softly, his voice thick with a raw, unyielding emotion. “No one touches what is mine. Not the Romanos, not the commission, and certainly not Isabella.”
Speaking of Isabella, upstairs in the west wing, the future bride was currently pacing across her plush white carpet in a blind fury. The humiliation of being dismissed in front of the entire household staff by a man she intended to rule beside was a mortal insult. She pulled out her private burner phone and dialed her father, Vincent Romano, directly.
“Father, we have a catastrophic problem,” Isabella hissed into the receiver, her voice trembling with venom. “Alessandro has completely lost his mind over the cleaning woman and her brat. He threw me out of the hallway like a stray dog. He’s hiding something—there is history between him and that maid.”
On the other end of the line, Vincent Romano’s voice was a cold, calculating rasp. “Calm yourself, Isabella. A marriage between our families is a corporate necessity, not a romance. If the Moretti bloodline is being compromised by a servant, we remedy the situation quietly. Keep your eyes open, play the dutiful fiancée for forty-eight hours, and let my enforcers handle the liability.”
That night, while the estate slept under a blanket of autumn fog, shadows moved across the twelve-acre grounds. Two of Vincent Romano’s elite tactical enforcers slipped past the wrought-iron gates, bypassing the security sensors that had been temporarily deactivated by a bribed groundskeeper. Their objective was simple and terrifying: eliminate the housekeeper and her child, framing it as a tragic random burglary, thereby removing the emotional distraction and forcing Alessandro back into absolute alignment with the Romano alliance.
They crept through the kitchen service entrance, their black combat boots making zero sound against the polished floorboards. One of them held a silenced pistol, moving stealthily toward the back quarters where Rosa and Lily slept.
They didn’t make it past the pantry.
Out of the darkness of the narrow corridor stepped Mr. Bruno, the elderly butler, holding a heavy, nineteenth-century silver candlestick like a club. Before the leading enforcer could react, Bruno brought the heavy metal down with astonishing, lethal precision across the man’s temple, dropping him instantly to the floor. The second enforcer lunged forward with a combat knife, but from the shadows behind Bruno stepped two of Alessandro’s most trusted personal bodyguards, who tackled the intruder to the ground, subduing him in a swift, brutal flurry of closed-room combat.
Within sixty seconds, the assassins were zip-tied, gagged, and dragged down into the subterranean wine cellar.
Downstairs, sitting behind his heavy walnut desk in the dark study, Alessandro Moretti calmly poured a glass of amber bourbon. He hadn’t been sleeping. A Don who expects betrayal is never caught off guard. He had anticipated the Romanos’ paranoia the moment Isabella threw her tantrum in the hallway.
The heavy oak door of his study opened silently, and Mr. Bruno stepped inside, bowing slightly. “The trash has been collected, Boss. They were carrying Romano insignia blades.”
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Alessandro took a slow sip of his bourbon, his slate-grey eyes flashing with a dangerous, incandescent light. “Vincent thinks he can send a message into my home,” Alessandro murmured, his voice dropping into a register of absolute, terrifying death. “He thinks a wedding contract makes me his subordinate. He is about to learn what happens when you threaten a Moretti inside his own nest.”
He stood up, buttoning his charcoal suit jacket. “Bring them to the courtyard. And wake up Isabella. It’s time she learned the family business.”
