Let's not even mention that Davide was a penniless nobody from a dying crew in a rust-belt town when I married him. A man with nothing to his name but charm and ambition. Even when I entrusted him with oversight of our territory and its operations, he nearly bled the Syndicate dry through incompetence and skimming.
Half our revenue streams had withered under his watch. Legitimate fronts hemorrhaging money. Protection rackets mismanaged. Arrangements with allied families neglected until they soured.
If he weren't my husband, I would have had him exiled years ago. Or worse.
But Luna and these parents actually saw him as some powerful Don. Every single one of them looked up to him with admiration, desperate to kiss the ring of a man who had no right to wear one.
Led by Luna, the other parents followed suit. They pulled the remaining paintings from the trunk and tore them apart with their hands. Canvases ripped. Frames snapped. Collectibles I'd acquired at auction just that morning, pieces I hadn't even had the chance to place in the estate's vault, were smashed against the pavement one by one.
I watched these people destroy a fortune in minutes. Watched them laugh while they did it.
Then, calmly, I pulled out my phone.
"Why aren't you here yet?" My voice was low, controlled. The voice my mother had taught me. The voice of a Donna who does not repeat herself. "You need to be in front of me within five minutes."
Before I could hear the response, one of the parents lunged forward and slapped the phone from my hand. It hit the pavement and the screen shattered, fragments of glass skittering across the stone.
"Trying to call for help? Where do you get the nerve?"
"Are you pretending to be someone important?"
"She's probably calling one of her clients to put on a show for us!" The woman who said it threw her head back laughing. "Hahaha!"
The laughter spread. Open, mocking, fearless. They had no idea what they were laughing at. No idea whose phone lay broken on the ground.
I stared at the shattered screen. My reflection looked back at me in fragments.
"I hope you'll still be laughing this hard in a few minutes," I said.
The laughter didn't stop. But something in the courtyard shifted. A change in pressure, like the air before a storm, that only I seemed to feel.