Chapter One
I stare at Alfredo; his muddy brown eyes glare back at me, his greying hair looks lank, greasy almost, and my lip curls.So disgusting.I’m vaguely confused. What the fuck is happening? Well, I know what’s happening. I’m being double-crossed, and I need to think fast. This is going sideways really, really quickly. I thought something like this could happen, but it was a slim chance, a minor possibility. I didn’t really believe it.
Alfredo is standing in front of me and Father, a gun pointed at us, screaming, red-faced, spittle flying out, and it’s all I can focus on—his snarled mouth as he spews hatred.
“I was never going to be good enough, was I? You said I was the son you never had, you said I was next in line, you’ve been training me all these years, and you promised her to me when I took over. Now you think I’m letting you take it all away? You think I’m allowing you to remove what’s rightfully mine? This”—he flicks the end of the gun, gesturing around the room—“this is all fucking mine, you sorry sack of shit! You’re a pathetic excuse for a human being. I will not be cut off. I will not be left out,and I will not bow to whichever cunt you’re handing the family to, and my fucking prize for doing your dirty work all these years is her. She’s mine.”
In different circumstances, this would have been flattering. My “boyfriend”—I use the term lightly because in reality he groomed me, or would have, at least, if I wasn’t very aware from an appallingly young age of who he was and what he was capable of—is my tormentor. If I had been less aware and more naïve towards his advances, I’m sure he would have been my rapist, too. My “boyfriend” is fighting for me, refusing to lose me, refusing to be frozen out of our family, but in fairness, this whole situation is fucked up. He’s angry, not because he’s losing me, but because I would have given him a legitimate claim to be the head of one of the five. A fully-fledged member of the Syndicate.
Without me, he’s back to being the street urchin he was before my father found him all those years ago, when he was nothing, a nobody from the wrong side of the tracks. A runt to carry out his bidding, fighting for scraps of attention from Father, the whole time just being used like the rest of us. I could almost feel sorry for him—almost, if he wasn’t such a blight on society. Father has been plotting behind both our backs, but for how long? Who the hell knows? So here we are.
My father is one of the top Mafia Dons who runs this area. There are five families: the Riccis, the De Lucas, the Costas, the Mancinis, and then us, the Bianchis. Our ancestors formed a syndicate generations ago, binding the families together in archaic, outdated nonsense that the leaders of these families follow blindly. I’m the only heir to our name, but to my father’s disgust, I was bornwith a vagina, and Father thought I wouldn’t amount to anything. He thought it best for me to just be arm candy, a prize for one of the five sons, the one he would name his successor, because a girl could never be a Mafia queen. God forbid I ever amounted to anything more than a walking womb.
Unfortunately for my father, I take after my mother, or so I’m told by people who knew her. I look like her, too, with my piercing blue eyes, dark, rich chocolate brown hair, olive complexion, and personality. I’m cunning and devious, and I always get what I want. Since the age of fourteen, I’ve been plotting to take over the family business. I’ve been skulking in the shadows, learning what I can, from whom I can.
My father took in Alfredo when I was four; he was in his twenties by then. He’d been living on the streets since he was a child, and Father used him, flattered him into doing all his dirty work, the jobs he couldn’t be bothered with, the ones he deemed beneath him where he just didn’t want to get his own hands dirty, promising him the world. Feeding his ego, making him believe he was an integral part of the organisation. Alfredo has followed him like a lost puppy screaming for attention and Father, throwing just enough scraps to keep him in line, only now pulls the rug out from under him.
My mother died when I was twelve in a horrific car accident, but I suspect Father had her killed. If I’m honest, everything points to Father being behind it. But there’s never quite enough evidence. He claimed she was becoming more of a “liability” due to her ever-decreasing mental state. She hadn’t managed to give him a son or even another daughter, but in fairness, none of hismistresses had either, so I think he was the issue. Anyway, that’s beside the point…
Alfredo soon crawled his way up the ranks, and when my mother died, he became my father’s second, leading me to believe he could also be the one who killed her to gain his footing.
My “boyfriend” Alfredo—whatever you want to call him—was then put in his position of power as my father’s right-hand man, promised my hand in marriage once I turned twenty-one. Father would then transfer everything to him after we were married.
I wasn’t given a say, but it is what it is, I suppose. Apparently, this is all I’m suitable for, and I can feel the resentment that my mother had for my father seeping into our relationship. Well, it’s not a relationship. My father has never been… present.
Alfredo started to pursue me after my mother died, starting with inappropriate lingering touches, whispers, and promises of all the things he would give me, things that by rights were already mine. Two weeks before my mother died, on my twelfth birthday, she had given me one piece of advice:“Men will give you what you want if you fuck them good. Men will burn the world for you if you fuck them great.”I decided the only way to take what I wanted when I was old enough was to play them at their own game. But to play it better and play to win.
I became compliant. I became invisible. I became the eye candy, the perfect little daughter and girlfriend—secretly, obviously, as my father would have shot Alfredo then and there for laying a finger on me before the wedding night. I became everything they wanted me to be. Father has been parading my virginity around like hisfucking prized possession, like some kind of family jewel to covet. He would have lost his shit if he knew that his right-hand man had been fucking his precious bargaining chip since I was thirteen.
But I did what I had to do. I learnt, and I learnt fast. I gave him what he wanted, and I cooed at him and flittered around him, doting on him and his every need. He taught me so much more than he thought he did. I listened in on conversations. I followed them around, always with my nose stuck in a book so they would think I wasn’t listening. I became invisible in my own house so they wouldn’t realise I was eavesdropping, and I paid attention to the hierarchy, the structure of it all, the way the families worked, the way the business worked.
I had private tutors who were supposed to teach me the general subjects, but part of the deal I struck with my father was that if I wasn’t going to attend proper school, I was allowed to pick my own tutors, so I was taught finances and money laundering, the inner workings, and how to take over. I kept my head down. I worked hard. Father paid handsomely but never paid attention. As far as he was concerned, I was studying Italian, English, mathematics, and sciences, but I was really learning how to take over. How to be better, and how to turn the entire business around.
My father was renowned in our circles and is a vile human, so the tutors taught me what I wanted while enjoying the money they were receiving. I secretly think they liked pulling one over my father, and I was happy to take all the knowledge I could because, in this world, knowledge is power, and I will be the most powerful person in the Syndicate.
As I got older, I had a personal trainer, Craig, who was an ex-military man, and I convinced him to teach me to fight, shoot, and defend myself, all under the guise of general fitness. How did I get him to keep his mouth shut and teach me all those things? Well, I took my mother’s advice. Don’t get me wrong, Father paid him well to create meal plans and exercise regimes to keep me fit and attractive for the time I became a baby-making machine because, let’s face it, that’s all I was ever going to be good for in his eyes.
But as Mother said before, you get a man to do what you want by being a good fuck and get him to burn the world for you by being a great one, so I played young, naïve, and virginal to both my father’s right-hand man and my trainer. Both were brutes of men, but both also wanted to keep everything secret because, well, I was fucking young.
I first lost my virginity to Alfredo when I was thirteen. I was still a child, but I also had to become a grown-up fast.
I’ve had to navigate this world and take what I want for myself, and I want to rule. If I have to fuck to get there, I will do what it takes. My trainer didn’t come into the picture until I was sixteen, and we started our arrangement almost immediately. I had already started to fill out. I was getting curvier, and Father thought if I went too far, too fat, I wouldn’t be such a prize heifer to him, so I turned it to my advantage.
Both men thought I was madly in love with them. I took what I needed and left them with little of the real me. One day, someone would be worthy of having the real me, all of me. Until that time, I would keep her hidden until Icalled her forward to take her rightful place at the head of the family, disposing of the meek outer shell I’d created—this caricature of a real person. I will destroy anyone and anything that gets in my way.
When I turned twenty-one, however, Father spouted some bullshit about the business having difficulties, so although he announced the engagement and we had a lavish party, he didn’t set a date for the wedding. For that, I was grateful, but Alfredo wasn’t. He was still expected to keep his hands to himself, which only made him more aggressive in the bedroom. It was almost like he was sticking one to my father instead of me.
But it wasn’t terrible. He was a shit lover. He was very self-serving, but it got me what I wanted. He would fuck me and rant about my father. I would tell him how “terrible it all was,” and he would tell me what he did for my father, trying to impress me with what a big man he was. Iooedandahhedat all the right times and fed his ego.
And Craig, my trainer, would take me out on spa days, which were actually to the firing range or to martial arts dojos or hotels to fuck. We started going more regularly, and my father was happy to have me out of the house. We would work out, work up a sweat, and fuck the rest of the afternoon away.
This I wasn’t mad about. He was a great fuck, and he also taught me how to be a great fuck, which would serve me well in the future. But it frustrates me now when I’m with Alfredo, because I have to play the naïve playmate who still quakes when I hold his unimpressive dick in my hands. It makes him feel like a man to have a mouse of a woman. Little does he know—even mice haveteeth.
Craig likes his women with a little more fire. It also lit something inside me that made me more confident. It gives me an edge, and he gives me orgasm after orgasm. When I come home struggling to walk, they all assume it’s from yoga or some such activity, if they even notice it at all, and I let them believe that’s why my muscles ache. When Alfredo fucks me, and I wince, he just thinks it’s that he’s so big, so manly. He would say,“I’ll ease in gently, Principessa, as it will take time for you to become accustomed to my size.”Well, that’s when he was trying to win me over, and lately, I haven’t even spoken to him.
If only he saw the size of Craig’s dick… he pales in comparison, and a quick thought of him gets me wet enough to endure Alfredo. Neither knows about the other; bruises and scratches are explained by fitness or running, and I get away with it. They think I’m clumsy and useless, and that’s if they even notice.
When I reached twenty-two and still had no wedding date, Alfredo started to get restless. He wanted to take over. He wanted me to start popping kids out to solidify his hold.
