THE MAFIA BOSS’S FIANCÉE ORDERED ME TO LEAVE HIS LATE FATHER’S SERVICE DOG OUTSIDE IN A THUNDERSTORM

The dining room of the Moretti estate had emptied, but the tension had only multiplied by tenfold.

Luca had not brought the old man through the front doors. Marco and Lev had supported Michael Moretti between them, cloaked in heavy canvas raincoats, guiding his shuffling, agonizingly slow steps through the private subterranean wine cellar entrance that connected the carriage grounds to the mansion’s lower level.

Vanessa had been escorted upstairs under armed guard. Luca hadn’t spoken a single word to her. He hadn’t looked at her. When she had tried to speak to him in the courtyard, he simply pointed toward the back stairs, and two stone-faced guards took her by the elbows and led her away.

Now, we were in Luca’s private study on the third floor.

It was a room few people ever entered. Lined with dark mahogany bookshelves reaching fifteen feet to the ceiling, an antique Persian rug over hand-scraped walnut floors, and a massive marble fireplace that crackled with dry birch logs. The air in here was warm, smelling of cedar, expensive pipe tobacco, and vintage scotch.

Michael Moretti sat in the deep leather wingback chair directly across from the hearth.

A wool blanket rested over his lap. Atlas lay sprawled across his feet, refusing to move even an inch away, his heavy head resting squarely on the old man’s slippers. Michael’s hands—spotted with age, the fingernails cracked and dirty—stroked the dog’s ears with a steady, rhythmic cadence.

Luca stood by the leaded glass window, his back turned to the room, looking down at the storm beating against the driveway below. He had changed into a clean dry shirt, but the cuffs were unbuttoned, rolled up to his forearms, revealing the dark ink of family crests and tactical marks running along his skin.

I stood near the door, clutching a tray with a pot of hot black tea, honey, and clean towels.

“Leave the tray on the side table, Emma,” Luca said quietly. He hadn't turned around, but he knew I was there. He always knew where everyone was.

“Yes, sir.” My hands shook slightly as the porcelain clinked against the polished mahogany. I prepared to bow my head and back out of the room. “I’ll return to the service quarters.”

“Stay.”

The command was soft, but absolute.

I froze, stepping back against the bookshelf, keeping my eyes low.

“Emma,” the old man’s voice rasped from the wingback chair.

I looked up. Michael Moretti was looking at me. His face was gaunt, skin stretched tightly over high, aristocratic cheekbones, deep grooves running from his nose to the corners of his mouth. But his eyes were terrifyingly sharp.

“You’re the girl who brought my dog inside,” Michael said.

“I... yes, sir. He was freezing.”

“Vanessa told you to leave him to die in the rain.”

I swallowed hard, glancing toward Luca’s broad back. “She told me not to let him in the house tonight.”

“She told you that because she knew Atlas had been digging,” Michael said, his voice gaining strength, the gravel turning into iron. “For three months, I’ve been tapping on that drainpipe behind the wall. Dogs don’t forget their masters, Luca. Men forget. Sons forget. But a dog knows the scent of blood.”

Luca slowly turned away from the window.

The contrast between the two men was staggering, yet they were mirror images separated by thirty years of war and sunlight. Luca was in the prime of his physical power—broad, dangerous, immaculate. Michael was a relic, broken by confinement, yet the aura of pure, unadulterated menace that had ruled the Chicago underworld for forty years still radiated from his hollow chest.

“The hospital in Zurich,” Luca said, his voice deadly level. “October fourteenth, eleven years ago. I stood in the room when the doctors called the time of death. The body was cremated three days later. The ashes were interred in the family crypt at Calvary Cemetery.”

Luca took three deliberate steps toward the chair.

“Whose ashes did I bury, old man?”

Michael gave a short, wheezing chuckle that ended in a dry cough. He reached up, touching his collarbone, where a jagged, puckered surgical scar ran from his throat down under his shirt.

“You buried a drifter from the streets of Milan,” Michael whispered. “A man with my height, my blood type, and enough terminal liver damage to make his death look natural on an autopsy report.”

Luca didn't flinch, but his jaw clenched so tightly the muscles knotted beneath his stubble. “Why?”

“Because the Council of Nine had already put a contract on my head,” Michael said, his eyes narrowing into cold slits. “And the man who signed the contract wasn't a rival family from New York. It wasn't the Russians. It was Salvatore Bellini.”

Salvatore Bellini.

Vanessa’s father. The highest-ranking consigliere of the Moretti syndicate. The man who had arranged the union between Luca and Vanessa three years ago to 'solidify the peace.'

The room seemed to drop ten degrees.

“Salvatore came to me in the Swiss clinic,” Michael continued, his voice dropping into a dark, hypnotic cadence. “He gave me a choice. I could die in that bed from a quiet injection of potassium chloride, and Luca would be allowed to inherit the family throne without bloodshed. Or I could resist, and he would trigger an all-out civil war on the streets of Chicago that would put my thirty-year-old son in the ground before he ever took the crown.”

Luca stepped closer. The shadows from the fireplace flickered across his face. “You gave up your empire to protect me?”

“Don't flatter yourself,” Michael spat softly. “I gave up my empire to buy time. Salvatore was too weak to kill me himself. He kept me alive in a private facility outside Montreal for eight years, trying to squeeze the Swiss vault numbers out of my skull. When his men grew careless, I made my move. But my body was failing. By the time I made it back to Chicago eight months ago, I was crippled.”

Michael lifted a trembling finger, pointing it directly at the floor.

“I didn't come to you, Luca. I couldn't reach you. Salvatore’s daughter had already woven herself into your bed, your home, your security team. Vanessa intercepted me at the train yard in Gary. She didn't tell you. She locked me in the carriage shed, keeping me alive on stale water and soup, waiting for her father to return from Sicily next week.”

Michael leaned forward, his knuckles digging into Atlas’s thick fur.

“The wedding was supposed to happen on Saturday. Once you signed the Bellini-Moretti syndicate merger, Salvatore was going to put a bullet through my brain, dump my body in the canal, and then poison your drink at the reception. The entire Moretti bloodline... wiped clean in a single weekend. And Salvatore Bellini would sit on the throne.”

I pressed my back harder against the bookshelf, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. This was a death sentence. To hear these words, to know this treason—in the world of the Chicago Syndicate, witnesses were never allowed to walk out the front gate.

Luca stood silent for a long moment. He looked down at his father’s watch, still resting on the low mahogany table between them.

“Emma,” Luca said.

“Yes, sir?” My voice squeaked.

“Bring Marco upstairs. Tell him to bring the keys to the eastern gate.” Luca’s eyes never left his father. “And Emma?”

“Sir?”

“If you speak a single word of what you heard in this room to any member of the staff, you will not live to see the sunrise. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Mr. Moretti.”