A Fresh Start

POV: Vita 

I sat on my balcony one October afternoon, three months to the day since I had boarded a plane under a name that wasn't mine and left Chicago, and everyone in it, behind me.

I had just finished unpacking the last of my boxes and setting every piece of furniture exactly where I wanted it. My new apartment reflected every part of me that five years of marriage had slowly sanded away. Every vase, every painting, every careful arrangement of white and grey and soft rose gold felt like proof that I still existed as someone other than a Salucci, other than a Marino heiress, other than a cautionary tale whispered about at Commission dinners.

I was exhausted from the day spent decorating my new haven, but I was happy, genuinely happy, in a way I hadn't let myself feel in longer than I wanted to admit. I'd hired an interior design team and paid them a small fortune without flinching, because for the first time in my adult life, the money in my accounts belonged to no one but me. Sofia had made certain of that before I ever left. My share of the Marino business, separated cleanly under the prenup, kept generating more than enough to buy whatever peace I wanted, and I had never once worried, not for a single afternoon, about whether I could afford this life.

The apartment sat on the middle floor of a beautiful building in one of the better parts of Manhattan, five blocks from the small, unglamorous magazine office where I had quietly taken a junior writing position under a name I'd invented for myself. Two bedrooms, both en suite, a wide balcony, walk-in closets large enough to make me laugh the first time I saw them. I'd placed a glass table and a pair of white steel chairs out here, facing a skyline that belonged to no family, no empire, no husband.

The moment the broker showed me through the door, I knew. It was expensive. It didn't matter. I had spent five years letting a man decide what I was allowed to want, and I had promised myself, somewhere in the fog of that last terrible week, that I would never do that again.

My parents would have hated it, if they'd known where to find me, which they didn't. They had never approved of much that I did on my own. My whole life, I had tried to win something from them that I was never going to get. Not when I graduated top of my class at university. Not when my grandfather, old and sharp-eyed until the very end, called me into his study a year before he died and told me, in that quiet voice he used only for things that mattered, that the empire would be mine. Not his son's. Mine.

My father never forgave either of us for that.

Elena had grown up in our house since she was twelve, after her own parents died, and somewhere in the years that followed, my mother had decided that loving her hurt less than loving me. Elena laughed easily. Elena never argued. Elena never made anyone feel like they'd failed simply by being in the room. I used to tell myself it didn't matter, that Lorenzo and my grandfather were the only family I needed, and most days that was even true.

It was true right up until I vanished from Chicago and handed my own company into Sofia's hands, and my parents, within a week, were telling anyone on the Commission who would listen that I had abandoned the family. That I'd run from my duties like a coward. That a woman who couldn't be found didn't deserve to be called Godmother of anything.

Lorenzo had put a stop to that within days, laying the truth of what Dominic and Elena had done on the table in front of the entire Commission, the money, the poison, all of it, with Sofia standing beside him refusing to let a single lie about me stand unchallenged. The accusations against me had died an ugly, public death.

My parents still didn't apologise. They still sent Elena flowers on her birthday and let three of mine pass without a word. In their eyes, somehow, even now, I was still the selfish one. The cold one. The daughter who had broken the family instead of the two people who had actually tried to kill me.

I'd stopped reading their emails somewhere around month two. I had a new life to build, and I refused to spend what was left of my heart defending myself to people who had already decided, long before any of this, exactly who I was allowed to be.

My eyes drifted to the balcony beside mine. I hadn't met my new neighbours yet, and some small, hopeful part of me wanted them to be ordinary. Pleasant. Boring in the specific way that meant no one would ever come looking for bodies in my building. I scanned their matching glass table, their steel chairs, black instead of white, an abandoned beer bottle and an overflowing ashtray that suggested at least one man lived over there, and probably no children.

A couple, maybe. Or a bachelor. Either way, no one was likely to complain if I had friends over, which was a small, foolish comfort after everything.

I was turning to go back inside when something caught the edge of my vision.

A man stepped out onto the balcony beside mine, wearing nothing but a pair of dark jeans, and I stopped moving entirely.

His torso was tanned and cut with the kind of lean, deliberate muscle that came from more than vanity, and his jet-black hair fell loose and a little wild across his forehead. He lit a cigarette and stared out at the skyline, lost somewhere in his own head, and even from this distance I could make out the sharp line of his jaw, the dark sweep of his lashes.

Something about him tugged at my memory, and then it clicked all at once, the way names sometimes do.

Xavier Kane.

I knew the name the way most of Manhattan did. Heir to Kane Industries, the steel and mining fortune his father had built from nothing, and the city's favourite rumour of a man, rich enough to disappear into his family's empire and stubborn enough to refuse. He'd taken a photography degree instead of a business one, worked freelance for half the magazines in the city, including, infuriatingly, the small one I'd just started writing for. Every woman in that office spoke his name like it was a prayer.

I'd never understood the fuss. Or I hadn't, until just now, watching him from behind my own curtain like some kind of amateur spy.

All right. He is not unattractive. Who am I kidding? He looks like something built specifically to ruin a woman's concentration.

I almost laughed at myself. Three months out of a marriage built entirely on lies, and here I was, hiding behind curtains for a stranger's cheekbones.

He pulled his phone from his pocket, made a short call I couldn't hear, and then put out his cigarette and disappeared back inside. A few minutes later he reappeared in a crisp white shirt and a leather jacket, and left without ever once glancing in my direction.

I let the curtain fall and stood there a moment longer than I needed to, something unfamiliar and faintly annoying stirring low in my chest.

It wasn't Julian, he definitely doesn't look like the feared Mafia Don my father spoke about. I knew that much. I hadn't heard a single word from him or from Miss Castellano since the day I'd sent that file across the city like a loaded gun with no name on the trigger, and three months of silence had taught me not to expect one. I told myself, standing there, that whatever this small, traitorous flicker of interest was, it had nothing to do with the man I'd promised myself to on paper and never once met in person.

I told myself that, and I almost believed it.

My new apartment, I thought, walking back inside with a small, unwilling smile, had just become considerably more interesting. 

A few weeks later, I found myself rushing to finish a deadline on a Monday evening. Part of my new job involved writing reviews of restaurants and venues around the city, and that night I owed the magazine eight hundred words on a newly opened place on Fifth Avenue. The food had been mediocre, the prices absurd, and the service so disorganised I'd ordered a Martini twice and received a Margarita both times.

I didn't want to be known around the office as the woman who could close down a restaurant with one article, but I wasn't willing to hand in a dishonest review either. Not any more. I'd spent five years being honest about everything except the one thing that mattered, and I wasn't going back to that version of myself for anyone, least of all a restaurant that couldn't manage a cocktail order.

I couldn't concentrate. Music drifted over from Xavier's balcony, low voices and the occasional burst of laughter, a card game by the sound of it, and the knowledge that he was out there, ten feet away, made it absurdly difficult to finish a sentence about truffle oil.

I went out for a cigarette, needing the air more than the nicotine, and the moment I stepped onto my own balcony, the voices next door went quiet. I felt it instantly, that prickling awareness of being looked at, and I hated how fast my pulse picked up over something so small.

I'm a grown woman who survived a mafia marriage. I am not going to come undone over a man's silhouette through a railing.

My phone rang before I could finish convincing myself of that. I nearly laughed at the timing.

"Vita." Sofia's voice, warm and a little tired, the way it always sounded by the end of a long day running an empire that wasn't technically hers. "You're not answering your emails again."

"I'm not answering anyone's emails again," I said, stubbing out my cigarette and stepping back inside where no one could watch me do it. "How bad is it this time?"

"Your mother sent another one. Same as the last three. You abandoned the family, you left the business in a stranger's hands, you're too selfish to understand what the Godmother title actually means." Sofia paused. "I didn't bother forwarding it. I know you don't want them."

"Thank you."

"Lorenzo wants you to know the Commission's stopped listening to any of it. After what came out about Dominic and Elena, nobody with sense is calling you unfit for anything. Your parents are the only ones still saying it, and half the Commission thinks less of them for it, not you."