Chapter 2

She suddenly snatched the black crocodile Birkin off my shoulder.

“This is mine now. Going back to its rightful owner. Clara, this bag is three hundred grand. You don’t deserve it anymore.”

Martha lunged forward and grabbed it back.

“Miss Sinclair. That’s robbery. Inside the Moretti house.”

Vivian lost it. “You little bitch. I’m the real Mrs. Moretti. Everything in this house belongs to me. Watch — I’ll have you out on the street before breakfast tomorrow.”

Martha came with me the second year of my marriage. The Family didn’t plant her; I picked her myself. In a Mafia household, the housekeeper isn’t an employee. She’s loyalty. And in our world, loyalty runs deeper than blood.

“Miss Sinclair.” Martha’s voice was steady. “Mrs. Moretti bought this Birkin with her own year-end bonus. Not one cent of Moretti Family money touched it. What title do you actually hold in this Family? On whose authority are you standing here giving orders?”

Vivian sneered. “I have a DNA test. This child is the Moretti Family’s only male heir. Once he’s recognized today, the rest of you can get out.”

I picked up the report.

Letterhead: GenoTrace Laboratories, Newark, New Jersey.

Subject: “L. Moretti,” age five. Sample provider: “A. Moretti.” Result: biological paternity confirmed, with a match probability of 99.998%.

Martha leaned in close to my ear, her voice shaking. “Mrs. Moretti, we...”

I patted the back of her hand. “Hold.”

That was when I heard it: an old Rolls-Royce Phantom pulling up the drive.

A car door shutting. Then heels on stone.

Martha hurried to the door.

Eleanor Moretti walked into the living room.

Eleanor always looked like she’d just stepped off the cover of Vogue.

Seventy-four years old. Born in Sicily. She came to New York at sixteen with her father, the previous Don of the old Moretti Family.

At nineteen she married her late husband, Francesco Moretti. At twenty-one she gave birth to Adrian. Francesco was gunned down outside a restaurant in Little Italy when Adrian was fifteen, with seven bullets from the Ricci Family.

She raised her boy alone and held the Moretti Family together for twelve years, until Adrian turned twenty-seven and took the seat.

Her white hair, not a strand out of place. The Donna ring on her hand caught the chandelier and held it.

Vivian moved before I could.

She lunged forward, grabbed Eleanor’s hand, and the tears were already coming.

“Mother — please, let me call you that. I finally found you. You don’t know what these years have been like, raising your real grandson alone. All for Adrian. All for the Moretti Family...”

“Standing here in front of you today, my heart can finally rest.”

Eleanor pulled her hand back.

She crossed to the early-1900s Italian Chesterfield in the center of the room and sat down, not looking at Vivian.

“Miss Sinclair, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Yes, Mother. You remember me.”

Eleanor didn’t answer.

She just opened the cherrywood cigar box on the table and took out a Cohiba Behike 52, the cigars commissioned exclusively for the Moretti Family, each one branded with our crest.

Martha stepped up with the silver cutter, snipped the cap, and lit it.

Eleanor drew on it and let the smoke out slowly.

Then she looked up.

“Two years ago, when your mother needed a heart bypass, Clara wired $280,000 to the hospital from one of the Moretti Family’s charitable funds. She didn’t tell a single person on the books. Not even Adrian.”

“As for the London job, Clara called her old Columbia classmate herself. He’s a managing director at Coutts. That phone call ran forty-two minutes.”

Eleanor set the cigar down.

“Miss Sinclair. I learned your name from my daughter-in-law.”

“From the way she talked about her friend.”

The pitiful little face Vivian had been wearing froze in place.

Eleanor gestured at the armchair opposite.

“Sit.”

Vivian hesitated, then sat.

“Since you had the nerve to walk through this door today, let’s clear things up.” Eleanor took another draw on the cigar. “You said there’s something between you and my son. You don’t get to make that claim true just by saying it. Not in this room. Not on this couch.”

“You don’t know my son. I do.”

“My son has never gone after a woman in his life. Not one. Except his mother, before he could walk.”

“This Family came out of Sicily four generations ago. A hundred and thirty-five years in New York. Any woman this name has ever wanted has been delivered to the door. The Genovese. The Lucchese. Even the Outfit out of Chicago. Every year, they sent over a list of eligible girls for my son.”

“The year Adrian turned twenty-seven and took the Don’s seat as the youngest one on the Commission, the marriage lists covered an entire table in my study.”

“He didn’t look at one of them.”

“He has never chased a woman.”

“Not until he met Clara.”

Eleanor’s eyes came to mine.

There was something soft in them I’d never seen before.

“Clara was twenty-four. Fresh out of Columbia Law. Working at a firm that specialized in suing the Moretti Family across a courtroom. My son wanted to meet her. By our rules, you have someone make an introduction, you send a gift, you take her to dinner. Three days, you’re sitting at the same table.”

“But Clara doesn’t play that game.”

“She’s a cop’s daughter. She grew up at the 84th Precinct in Brooklyn. The thing she’d hated her whole life was our rules.”

“My son knew that.”

“So he didn’t follow our rules to get her.”

“He did it the normal way.”

“He dismissed the car service that drove him to and from work. Every morning at six-thirty, he’d drive his own Volvo to the little coffee shop downstairs from her firm and buy two coffees. One for Clara. One for the receptionist.”

“Eighty-seven days in a row.”

“He told every Capo in the Family that no one was allowed to so much as say her name. He didn’t want a single soldier going anywhere near her our way.”

“He asked her out. She turned him down six times.”

“The sixth time, she looked him in the face and said, ‘Adrian, you are the man I have liked most in my whole life. But that Brioni suit you’re wearing, those John Lobb shoes on your feet, the five soldiers standing behind you, I have hated everything they stand for my whole life.’”

“’I can’t marry you.’”

“That night, my son came home.”

“He took off the Brioni. He threw out the John Lobbs. He put the M1911 at his hip in the safe.”

“He looked at me and said, ‘Mom, I want out of the Family.’”

“He said, ‘Let Vincent take the Don’s seat. I’m going to marry Clara.’”

Eleanor looked at me.

I was standing by the fireplace, and my breath caught.

He’d never told me this.

“I said no,” Eleanor went on. “I told him: you don’t walk out of the Moretti Family just because you want to.”

“But I told him: if Clara is the woman you want, the rules of this Family can bend. Once. For her.”