Alle Kapitel von THE DON'S SECRET HEIR: Kapitel 1 – Kapitel 6

Sunday came and I wasn't ready for it.Three days I'd spent trying to find a way out and got absolutely nowhere. Called my cousin Fia in Rome on Friday she'd married out of this life a few years back and I thought maybe she'd have something useful. She listened to everything I said and told me to pray. I hung up on her.Thought about going to my mother maybe four or five times. Talked myself out of it every single time. I kept seeing her hand on my knee at dinner, that hard grip, and I just couldn't. Couldn't walk into her room and drop something else on her that she'd carry by herself in silence.By Saturday night I'd made my peace with going in empty. No angle, nothing. Just me and whatever face I could hold together for a few hours.I was good at faces. Grew up here didn't I.He handed his keys off without even glancing at the guy holding his hand out for them. Just didn't look. Not mean about it, not deliberate.Just genuinely didn't occur to him that there was a person standing t

Franco Moretti was not a big man.That was the first thing that surprised me when the car door opened Friday evening.I'd built him up in my head into something enormous years of my father speaking about him in that particular careful tone he reserved for people he genuinely respected, which was maybe four people alive and what stepped out onto our gravel drive was a compact, silver haired man in his late sixties with a walking stick he clearly didn't need and eyes that moved over everything like a camera taking inventory.They moved over me last.I stood at the door the way Papa asked. Green dress, hair up, the whole picture of a respectful future daughter in law. I smiled when Luca came around the car behind his father and I smiled when the two sisters climbed out after, younger than I expected, pretty in an expensive way.Franco Moretti looked at my face for maybe three seconds.Then he looked at Luca.Something passed between them that I wasn't meant to understand. Then the old ma

I was sixteen the first time I watched my father have a man killed.I wasn't supposed to be there. Came down for water at two in the morning, barefoot on the cold marble stairs, and stopped three steps from the bottom when I heard the sounds from the east wing.Not shouting, Papa never shouted. Something worse than shouting. The particular quality of noise that told you a person had moved past the point of asking for anything.I should have gone back upstairs.The east room door was open two inches. Enough.The man was on his knees on the stone floor with his wrists tied behind him and his face already past the point of looking like a face. Two of Papa's men stood back against the wall. Papa himself sat in a chair in his shirtsleeves with a glass of something amber, watching with the same expression he wore reading his morning paper.The man said something. Wet and broken, barely words.Papa set his glass down with a small precise click."You stole from me three times," he said. Almos