Chapter 1

“Why haven’t you gotten rid of this lunatic? She doesn’t deserve to live under the Moretti Family’s protection!”

The moment Lucas emerged from the underground chapel, he was a different man.

An hour earlier, he had still been whispering words of love to me. Now his face was twisted with rage.

He lunged at me, seized me, and slammed me onto the stone floor. Both hands closed viciously around my throat.

“If I were you, I would have thrown her into the Mediterranean and fed her to the fish years ago!”

His voice was trembling.

I stared into his eyes.

They were filled with fear and hatred.

I knew that look far too well.

For ten years, nearly every man had looked at me that way.

“Lucas! Have you lost your mind?” I rasped as I struggled beneath him.

“You’re the one who’s insane! You have blood on your hands. You’re a venomous snake hiding filthy secrets, yet they still let you live freely!”

I had been trained to fight, but the attack came too suddenly. He was stronger than me, and I never had a chance to defend myself.

He drove his knee hard into my stomach.

The pain drained every ounce of strength from my body, and my breathing grew weaker by the second.

Just when I thought I was going to die at his hands, my father’s voice cut through the air, cold and utterly devoid of emotion.

He seemed to have been hiding in the shadows all along, watching everything unfold without the slightest intention of stopping it.

“Enough, Lucas.”

Lucas immediately released me and turned toward my father.

His voice was still shaking.

“Don Moretti... why didn’t you tell me sooner that she was this kind of person?”

My father didn’t answer.

He stepped forward and kicked Lucas away from me.

“Get out.”

Lucas staggered to his feet and fled the estate.

My father looked down at me and pressed his leather boot mercilessly onto the back of my hand.

“You can’t even handle an outsider without forcing me to dirty my hands. Pathetic.”

I didn’t fight back.

There was no point.

He was my father, but more than that, he was the Don—a man whose power reached across Sicily.

That night, as usual, he locked me in the dark room beneath the estate.

I didn’t cry, and I would never beg him.

I was the princess of the Moretti Family, yet I had become its greatest outcast.

This was the tenth time.

It had been happening ever since I was twenty, when I first brought a fiancé home to undergo the so-called loyalty test.

Ten years. Ten men. Not one exception.

Each man entered the underground chapel swearing that he loved me. By the time he came out, he was convinced that I was an unforgivable monster who had to be destroyed.

My father told everyone that I suffered from severe mental illness. He claimed I had once lost control, desecrated a sacred family relic, and offended God.

To appease God’s wrath, he said, he had no choice but to punish me under Family law and do whatever it took to “discipline” me.

Everyone outside believed him.

No one believed me.

After all, he was a respected Don, famous for his devotion to his late wife and his generosity toward members of the Family.

The only stain on his otherwise flawless life seemed to be me—his deranged daughter.

I had never believed in anything supernatural.

But now, I was terrified of the underground chapel beneath the estate.

Using an encrypted messaging app, I secretly contacted several childhood friends who lived in Rome.

They found the entire situation impossible to believe. None of them had ever heard of someone entering their own family chapel and emerging with a completely different personality.

They urged me to find a way inside and uncover whatever my father was hiding.

Some even wondered whether whatever was inside that chapel had something to do with the way he had treated me so coldly since childhood.

I had also wondered whether I was truly a Moretti by blood.

I secretly obtained a strand of my father’s hair and had a DNA test performed.

The result was undeniable.

I was his biological daughter.

In everyone else’s eyes, my father’s love for my mother had never faded.

“Maria was the only woman I ever loved. I will never want anyone else.”

He had remained alone all these years.

I had even lied to myself, telling myself that perhaps my mother had died too young and that because I looked so much like her, seeing me simply caused him too much pain.

For a while, that excuse softened my heart.

Then I saw how he treated my two adopted younger sisters.

He smiled at them. He listened to them patiently. He even personally guided their fiancés through the Family’s marriage ritual.

He knew how to be gentle.

He simply refused to give any of that gentleness to me.

I had endured enough.

The moment Lucas wrapped his hands around my throat, I decided I would endure no more.

That night, I called my maternal grandfather in Rome.

He was a feared veteran of the Sicilian Mafia, a former Don who had once ruled with an iron fist.

After listening to everything I told him, he replied in a cold voice,

“I’ll be there tomorrow.”

Early the next morning, he arrived at the Moretti estate with my uncle and a group of his most trusted men.