Focus, Vincenzo.
You’re about to meet your wife.
The thought sends an unexpected flutter of nerves through my stomach. I’ve seen exactly one photo of Adora Montoni. A portrait, carefully posed. Golden hair piled high, amber eyes cool and assessing, a Mona Lisa smile that reveals nothing. She looks like every other mafia princess I’ve ever seen. Beautiful, untouchable, and bored with the world.
Dad sent it to me three weeks ago. I’ve looked at it maybe a hundred times since, trying to imagine what our life together might be like.
Adora has been raised in luxury and privilege, protected from the ugliness of our world. I’m a killer, and it shows in my eyes and the way I move. The blood I’ve spilled never really washes away.
She’s going to take one look at me and flinch.
But this is what our fathers want. What our families need. Peace, bought with a marriage contract. The Montonis and the Vicis, united at last so we can focus on the real threat in Malus.
The Dervishis.
I climb the steps and push through the entrance doors.
The hallway is empty. No doorman, no greeter, no voices filtering from the ballroom. The silence feels wrong. I walk quickly down the corridor, my footsteps muffled by thick carpet. Oil paintings in gilded frames watch me pass. The double doors to the ballroom are closed.
I push them open.
The smell hits me first. The coppery stench of death.
The golden ballroom, so beautiful from the doorway, is painted in red. Bodies are sprawled across white marble. Pooled blood is spreading. The chandelier is glittering over the carnage below.
“No,” I cry raggedly, and run across the blood-slicked floor.
My father lies on his back, eyes open and empty with bullet holes in his chest. His hand is still reaching for the gun he never drew.
“Dad.” I drop to my knees beside him, pressing my hands against the wounds. His blood is still warm. This just happened.
I see my cousin Dante next, and then Marco. My brother is crumpled beside my mother.
“Mom.” I crawl toward her, leaving bloody handprints on the marble. “Mom, no, no, no.”
Her face is white and bloodless, and her elegant black dress is shredded by bullets. Her hand is reaching toward my sister. Valentina lies a few feet away, her pretty face frozen in terror and pain. She’s wearing the new dress she was so excited about, and it’s soaked in red.
My howl of anguish echoes off the golden walls.
I gather my sister into my arms, rocking her, pressing my face against her hair. She’s so small, and her flesh is growing cold already. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I should have been here. I should have protected you.”
This was supposed to be a peace offering. An engagement to unite our families.
The Montonis laid a trap and slaughtered us instead.
I lay Valentina down and force myself to stand. They must have mistaken my cousin for me and opened fire. I wonder if they’ve realized their mistake yet, or if they believe they’ve won.
I stand in the center of the massacre, surrounded by my family’s bodies, thinking of the woman in the photograph. Was Adora Montoni part of this? Was she standing here watching while they murdered my family with that indifferent smile on her lips?
Of course she was. She’s a Montoni. This was probably her idea.
And I commissioned her a fucking necklace.
My heart shatters inside me and reforms into something harder and colder.
I drop to my knees once more beside my mother and close her eyes with gentle fingers, and then do the same for my father, my brother, my sister, and my cousin.
“Every single Montoni,” I whisper to them. “I’ll kill them all. I swear it.”
