THE MAFIA'S PRICE
The ledger.
My mind flashed back to that rainy afternoon weeks before my engagement, when I’d slipped into my father’s study and found the plain black leather book I wasn’t supposed to see. I’d only opened it for a second, but the entries were seared into me: payments to the Ivanovs, timed to fabricate a debt that never existed; a note in my father’s sharp, slanted handwriting about how the “Ivanov problem” would be solved by “the Moretti wolf.” He hadn’t just sold me to Dante. He had engineered the entire collapse, and used me as the final sacrifice to bury a rival family. The whiskey scent clinging to Dante’s breath suddenly twisted into the stench of betrayal.