Chapter 1

Luca Vitali was the sole heir to the Vitali Cosa Nostra Family. And me? Isabella Berti. Just the daughter of the Family’s head steward.

I was twelve when I followed my mother through the gates of the Vitali family’s coastal compound, and first saw Luca in the sun, firing a 9mm at targets down the cliffside.

He turned his head, and his face was that of a fallen angel, straight out of the old Sicilian legends.

In that single glance, the name Luca Vitali was burned into my bones.

I never spoke a word of the love I hid in my chest.

Not just because of the chasm between our stations, but because I knew Luca’s heart already belonged to someone else.

Sofia Lombardi.

His childhood sweetheart, the only daughter of the Lombardi crime family.

He never hid how he doted on her, shielded her from every drop of blood and every bitter feud that came with the life.

When we were eighteen, a rival family set an ambush.

Luca threw himself over Sofia, took the full force of the car bomb blast.

Shrapnel tore through his throat, shredded his vocal cords, left him completely mute.

But in the darkest days of his life, Sofia never set foot in the Vitali estate again.

Instead, she ran off with the heir of the very family that had ordered the hit.

The Vitali family was tearing itself apart then.

Rival capos circled like vultures, waiting for the mute heir to fall.

The Family’s ruling Commission shipped him off to a derelict estate deep in the Sicilian countryside, and left him there to rot.

I begged to be transferred to that estate.

For seven years, I was his shadow, his only protection.

In those seven years, I stopped three hits from his own family, ran the last of his underground casino operations that hadn’t been seized, and chased down every top surgeon across Europe who could fix his throat.

I held him through the night terrors, wiped the blood from his hands, sat with him in silence when the world felt like it was closing in.

With me by his side, Luca crawled out of hell.

His voice came back rough, gravelly, permanently scarred.

And it took him only one year to hunt down every traitor in the family, to take his rightful place as Don of the Vitali Family, the unchallenged Capo dei Capi of the Sicilian underworld.

I was the one he kissed, touched, loved in the dead of night, when the world outside didn’t exist.

But never in my worst nightmares did I imagine that the first thing he’d do, once he held all the power, was sign a legally binding marriage contract with the woman who’d abandoned him.

For years, I’d learned to shoot, to run numbers, to navigate every brutal, unwritten rule of the Cosa Nostra.

All to keep up with him.

But no matter what I did, Anna never thought I was worthy of her son, the Don.

She’d shoved checks in my face a hundred times, told me to take the money and disappear.

Before, Luca would have torn up those checks, would have screamed at his mother for daring to insult me.

I’d always thought, as long as we had each other, we could outrun anything.

But that night, in the back of that Lincoln, I’d heard every word of his plan.

I was done.

Anna’s voice was thick with unmasked contempt when I spoke.

“You finally came to your senses? Good. Get here now. We’ll sign the papers.”

I stared at the address she texted, huffed a bitter, humorless laugh, and hailed a cab.

“Sign it. Half the money will be wired to your account today, the rest the day you leave Italy. You swear to never show your face to Luca again, for the rest of your life. Understand?”

My gaze flicked to the staggering number on the page, my lashes fluttering for just a second. I’d never see Luca Vitali again.

Finally, I picked up the pen, and signed my name in one clean, sharp stroke.

Anna let out a sharp breath of relief, tucking the contract into her bag.

She stood, and tossed one last cold line over her shoulder before she left.

“I give you two weeks. Vanish. Change your name, leave the country, I don’t care. You make sure Luca never finds you. Ever.”