Chapter 2

I didn't go home.

I went to the one place I'd sworn I'd never enter again — the De Luca estate, a fortress of stone and iron on the cliffs above the city, my grandmother's monument to a power older than the law.

The man at the gate didn't recognize me. Why would he? The last time I'd been here, I was twenty-three, screaming that I refused to inherit a kingdom built on blood.

"I'm here for the council," I said.

He looked at my cheap coat, my swollen eyes. "You'll need an appointment, signorina."

I pulled out the only thing I had left of that life — a black coin, a single silver falcon stamped on its face. My grandmother had pressed it into my palm when I was eighteen. For the day you stop running, she'd said.

The man's face turned the color of ash.

"Donna De Luca," he whispered. He stepped back and the gates groaned open. "We've been waiting. For weeks."

Inside, in a hall built for kings, twelve of the most dangerous men in the country rose to their feet when I entered.

The consigliere — an old wolf named Bruno — came forward. "Aria. Madonna. You have her eyes."

"I want to see everything she left," I said. "All of it."

They laid it out on the long table. In the last year of her life, my grandmother had quietly devoured the debts of every family who'd ever crossed her. Forty enemies, brought to heel through shell companies and silent loans. And there, near the bottom of the list, was a name that made my stomach turn to stone.

Falcone. Total leverage. Held in full.

She'd known. Somehow, she'd known about Matteo. About what he'd done to me. And in her last act on earth, she'd wrapped a chain around his family's throat and handed me the other end.

"There's a letter," Bruno said gently. "For you alone."

My hands shook as I broke the wax seal.

My fierce girl,

You wanted to know if you could live without me. I let you go because I loved you enough to watch you bleed. But I never once stopped watching.

I know what that boy did. I know how his mother spoke to you. I know you wept alone in a marble bathroom and believed no one would ever see.

I saw, my heart. I always saw.

Now it is your turn to be seen. Take everything they have. Burn it to the foundations if you wish. You are a De Luca. You were never theirs to throw away.

— Nonna

I read it three times before I could breathe.

"Donna De Luca," Bruno said. "The council needs an answer on the Falcone matter. Their don has petitioned us. He begs for forgiveness on his debts, or the family falls within the month."

I looked up. My voice did not shake.

"And the don is?"

"A boy. Matteo Falcone."

I set my grandmother's letter on the polished table.

"Call in every debt," I said. "And take the rest — the docks, the businesses, the name itself. Whatever it costs. I want it all."

Bruno's grey brows rose. "That would leave them with nothing. You'd own them completely."

I smiled for the first time in two years.

"Yes," I said softly. "I would."

Then the great doors opened behind me, and a deep voice cut through the room like a blade.

"Starting without me, piccola?"

I turned.

And the man in the doorway was the last person on earth I expected to ever see again.