Chapter 4

Since Victor was insisting, the old Don couldn't shut him down in front of everyone.

For fairness, Lillian and I would shoot at the same time.

The old Don gave a small nod to his consigliere.

The man understood and brought a gun over to Lillian.

In my previous life, I never knew her gun had been tampered with.

The sights were bent off-true, and she missed every one of her ten shots.

But what did it matter?

Even after Victor and I were married, she was still his one and only mistress, the only woman he doted on.

Every event that wasn't a Family obligation, the woman on his arm was Lillian.

This time, Lillian and I took our positions and lifted our guns.

I was set on losing. I missed nine in a row, on purpose.

Lillian, somehow, managed to be as reliably useless as she'd been the last time. Nine misses for her too.

She was on the edge of tears, glancing again and again at Victor.

He looked at her with all the warmth in the world, gesturing for her to calm down.

I let out a quiet, cold laugh, raised my gun, and sighted on her target.

The shot cracked through the air.

While no one was watching, I put a bullseye on her paper.

I wasn't fighting her for him this time. I was handing him over with both hands.

The Schillers were small. They had no business in this competition.

She wasn't even fully Sicilian.

It was only Victor's stubborn pushing that had gotten her a place at the trial in the first place.

The old Don had never thought much of her.

But he didn't know.

In my previous life, Lillian became Victor's mistress and bore him an illegitimate child.

I was the Donna of the Medici Family. My son should have inherited the Don's position.

But Victor made the will public in the end, leaving everything to Lillian's child.

What did it matter that he had no Sicilian blood? What of being an illegitimate child?

Victor extended all his affection for Lilian to their child.

My son thought his father was hard on him because he expected great things. After all, he was meant to inherit everything.

When the will was read, my son finally understood.

The hardness hadn't been expectation. It had been indifference.

His father didn't care about him, about me, about any of it.