Chapter 3

The first time I saw Vincent, he was sixteen.

His mother, Maeve, waited tables in a bar. His real father was the head of the Moretti crime family, but he had never once acknowledged the boy.

Vincent lived with his mother on the poorest street on Manhattan's West Side.

He went to school by day and washed dishes at a restaurant by night.

The school gave him a full scholarship, but the rich students still looked down on him. His uniform was secondhand, and his lunch was often nothing but a free apple.

And I was the youngest daughter of the Whitmore family.

My father ran a bank. My mother came from a Boston shipping family. I grew up in a mansion, learned to ride, and everyone around me told me I could only marry a man of the same standing.

But I fell for Vincent.

Every day I had the driver buy an extra breakfast, declared it tasted terrible, and tossed it to him.

He couldn't afford a math tutor, so I pretended I couldn't do the problems, asked him to tutor me, and paid him the highest rate going.

When classmates framed him for stealing a watch, I found the footage proving someone else had slipped it into his bag.

When he was beaten and two of his ribs were broken, I had a lawyer warn those students' parents and force them to pay his medical bills.

I did so much, but I never dared say straight out that I liked him.

Because my father had warned me, "You may help the poor. You may not marry them."

On the night of the graduation ball, I finally decided to tell Vincent how I felt.

In a white gown, I waited two hours by the back door of the gym.

Vincent never came.

My brother Arthur brought me a receipt. He said Vincent had taken fifty thousand dollars from the Whitmore family and agreed never to see me again.

I saw Vincent's signature on the receipt.

I cried all night.

But I didn't know that Vincent had received a letter too.

Arthur had written it, copying my handwriting.

It said: I only got close to you to win a bet with my friends. Poor trash like you has no right to like me.

Arthur also brought men to break Vincent's right hand, threw the fifty thousand dollars at him, and forced him to sign the receipt.

That same night, my parents sent me to London. They replaced my phone and intercepted every letter I sent to Vincent.

That was how we were separated.

I believed he had abandoned me for money.

He believed I had been toying with him all along.

The misunderstanding lasted ten full years.

In those ten years, Vincent didn't go to college.

First he hauled cargo at the docks, then he collected debts for a nightclub. Sent to recover ten thousand dollars, he not only brought the money back but found out the debtor had been stealing the owner's goods.

On the strength of that, he became the youngest crew boss in that crime family.

The Moretti family knew he was the old Don's bastard, and more than once sent men to kill him. He was stabbed three times and shot twice. Every time he healed, he took a piece of their territory.

At twenty-six, he took the Brooklyn docks.

At twenty-nine, he forced his own father to acknowledge him in public, and drove the three legitimate sons who had once bullied him out of New York.

At thirty-two, he became the new Don, recognized by all Five Families.

I followed every piece of news about him.

The first time he appeared in the newspaper, I bought twenty copies.

The first time he opened a legitimate company, I secretly talked the bank into opening his account.

When he was shot and hospitalized, I was in the next room giving him my blood.

We didn't see each other for ten years, yet I knew every time he was hurt and every time he succeeded.

All he knew was that I was the one who had written to humiliate him, and who had gotten Sophia killed.