The Don's Lost DaughterChapter 1
After my husband seized the Ferrante territory through a contested succession clause, he took his dead brother's widow and her two children to the city to build a new life.
My daughter and I survived on whatever I could scrounge from corner markets and church pantries, waiting for him in that freezing tenement on the wrong side of the waterfront for five long years.
The only news that ever came was that he'd been ratified by the Commission as head of the Ferrante family.
I carried my daughter across three state lines to find him, and the soldiers at the compound gate beat us with their fists like we were strays wandering onto sacred ground.
"Showing up at the Boss's compound claiming to be family? You must be tired of living. Don't you know how our Lady deals with hussies who come sniffing around?"
I lay in a heap of my own blood. "...Lady?"
When I lifted my head, I could just make out Gianna Greco in the distance, dressed like a Donna, her two children raised as the young prince and princess of the household.
Gianna greeted us with a warm smile and set out a plate of cannoli. They were laced with poison.
My daughter was starving. She wolfed down a piece and dropped dead on the spot.
I choked up a mouthful of black blood. As the world dimmed, I heard Gianna's vicious laugh cutting through the haze.
"Serafina Castellano, you should never have come here to disrupt our household. Dante has treated me as his wife for years. If you showed up alive, how was I supposed to go on being the Lady of this house?!"
My daughter and I died like dogs. They rolled our bodies in old carpet and dumped us in an unmarked lot past the rail yards.
After I was gone, Dante wrapped his arms around a weeping Gianna and murmured comfort against her hair.
"She's dead. Let it go. Even if she'd lived, I would've had the annulment papers drawn up and told her to stay away from our family."
The meal I'd once given a starving stranger, the vows he'd sworn on his mother's grave, all of it erased from his memory as though it had never existed.
I died with hatred lodged so deep it followed me into the dark. When my eyes opened again, it was the very day Dante took control of the Ferrante territory.
I threw the wilted greens from my hands, sold the tenement for every dollar it was worth, and carried my daughter to my father's compound, where I fell to my knees.