Chapter 2

For three days, I locked myself in the study, my fingers flying across the keyboard. Three years.

It had been three years since I'd touched this equipment, but the muscle memory hadn't faded.

I had to get into the Outfit's secure servers and find all the surveillance footage from the night of Salvatore's death.

[ACCESS DENIED.]

The cold, red warning flashed on the screen.

I frowned and switched to a backup port. Still no entry.

My heart sank. The firewall architecture, the encryption methods, the hidden security questions... I had taught him all of it.

Of course. My own husband had used my lessons against me.

The system's alarm blared, locking my terminal completely.

Raphael followed the sound of the alarm, his deep-set eyes finding me.

"Enough, Catherine."

"You have a choice. Accept Chiara's apology, or continue this charade and humiliate yourself in front of the entire city."

"You think," I looked up, incredulous, "that I'm the madwoman?"

"I just want you to be calm," he said, his tone softening at my cold expression, as if he were coaxing a child.

"Chiara was a wreck last night, couldn't sleep. She's consumed by guilt. We shouldn't make this any harder for her."

I stood up, meeting his gaze. "What exactly do you want me to be calm about? Do you have any idea who she really is?"

In the Leone family, no one knew Chiara better than I did.

My parents took her in after finding her on the streets, beaten by her deadbeat father. They raised her, gave her a home.

My brother Salvatore eventually gave her a job in one of our front businesses.

I was happy to have another sister, until I saw the truth with my own eyes two years ago.

I saw the real Chiara. Her face was a mask of malice as she tore a fistful of hair from a new girl's scalp, screaming, "Go ahead and tattle! Let's see who the Leone family believes!"

That night, I told Raphael and Luca what had happened. And what was their reaction?

"Catherine, are you sure?" Raphael had frowned. "Chiara has always been so gentle."

"But I saw it myself," I tried to explain.

"She must have had her reasons," Luca said, his voice calm. "Think about where she comes from, Catherine. Life hasn't been easy for her. You can't expect her to act like you."

The next day, Chiara came to me in tears.

"Miss Catherine, I couldn't sleep all night. I know what I did was wrong, but I didn't mean it…"

She knelt before me, tears tracing paths down her cheeks.

"I've been looked down on my whole life, so when I heard those words, I just lost control. Please, forgive me just this once."

Raphael and Luca witnessed the scene.

"Catherine, let it go," Raphael said, helping Chiara to her feet. "She knows she was wrong."

Luca nodded. "It doesn't hurt to show a little compassion to a girl who's had a hard life."

From that day on, whenever I mentioned Chiara's strange behavior, they told me I was overreacting.

And even now, all they could say was "be calm."

From the very beginning, no one had ever believed me.

As the thought crossed my mind, a familiar, terrifying smell of smoke flooded my nostrils.

I covered my mouth, coughing violently as the charred scent coiled in my lungs like a viper.

I fought to control my breathing, telling myself it was just a phantom smell.

But my body's reaction was terrifyingly real. The heavy, suffocating sensation threw me back to that hellish night.

Three years ago, we'd fallen into a trap set by a rival family, caught in a fire at an abandoned warehouse.

Raphael and Luca were knocked unconscious instantly, pinned by collapsed steel beams. It was Salvatore and I who charged into the inferno and dragged them out.

And Chiara?

She stood in a safe zone, covering her nose, complaining that the smoke would stain her white dress. As my brother and I risked our lives in the flames, she didn't lift a finger.

That fire nearly killed Salvatore and me. His left arm was badly burned, the muscle damaged.

And that fire left me with a ghost in my lungs: phantosmia.

Whenever I'm under extreme stress, I smell smoke that isn't there. Only I knew the agony of waking up in the middle of the night, choking for air.

But Chiara, with that faint scar on her cheek, had stolen the credit we'd paid for in blood.

I never dreamed Raphael would condemn us to hell over a debt that was a lie.

Raphael noticed my distress and moved to hold me, but I tore myself away, stumbling into the hallway.

"My brother was stabbed twenty-seven times. I'm not stopping the investigation."

I walked away, my body trembling. I had sworn I would not let my brother die in vain.

"Catherine," Raphael said, his voice grave. "If you insist on this, you know there will be consequences."

But I never imagined that overnight, Raphael and Luca would manage to turn black into white.

They falsified, destroyed, or buried every piece of evidence. They painted my brother as a monster, and his killer, a junkie, as a hero acting in righteous rage.

And Chiara's addict father became a hero who had righteously killed a rapist.

Rival families descended like hyenas smelling blood.

They began to cannibalize every inch of Leone territory, swallowing our business at the docks piece by piece.

Someone even had the audacity to leave a bullet on my parents' grave, a blatant challenge to the Leone family's authority.

Street punks started whispering that Salvatore Leone was nothing but a degenerate who colluded with drug dealers.

The businessmen who once bowed to our family now wouldn't even answer our calls. The empire our family had spent decades building crumbled overnight.

Staring at the bloody reality of this betrayal, my legs began to tremble uncontrollably.

Raphael and Luca were nothing more than two stray dogs my father had taken in from the streets.

We gave them food, shelter, and even seats of power in our family. For years, these two vipers had played their parts perfectly in front of me, all while secretly using our resources to build their own power base.

Now, their true faces were revealed. I was just prey in their carefully laid trap.

My phone buzzed. Raphael's low voice purred on the other end. "My dear Catherine, have you learned your lesson yet?"