Seraphina's POV
The helicopter rotors beat a steady rhythm against my skull. A private medic worked on my hand, tweezers catching the cabin light as he pulled glass fragments from my palm. Twelve stitches. The local anesthetic numbed my hand but did nothing for the ache spreading through my chest like a slow-acting poison.
I pressed my forehead against the cold window and watched the city shrink beneath us.
I'd met Dominic when I was twenty-two.
Three months earlier, I'd walked away from my father's estate. No Vitale name. No mafia princess privileges. No arranged marriage to a heir I'd never met. I'd wanted to be loved for who I was—not whose blood I carried, not what alliance I could broker.
I'd been so stupid. So young. So certain that love was something you found by running toward it.
Dominic was a mid-level dockworker then, hustling shipments in the gray zone between legal and not. Ambitious. Magnetic. A reputation for violence that clung to him like cologne, and a smile that made you forget every warning bell ringing in the back of your skull.
He said I was different. He said he'd never met anyone like me. He said a lot of things.
What he meant was: I had no visible family. No protection. And a surprising amount of savings.
I funded his first shipment. Forty thousand dollars from the account my father had set up for me, the one I'd sworn I'd never touch because I was *independent now*, I was *making it on my own*. I packed his bullet wounds with gauze and prayed over his hospital bed after a deal went bad. I took a knife to the forearm for Isabella when a rival crew cornered her outside a bar.
The scar was still there. A pale line on my left arm. Isabella had never thanked me.
I did it all because I believed we were building something together. That's what he'd called itbuilding something*. Our empire. Our future. Our life.
It turned out I was the only one building.
The helicopter touched down on the roof of the Vitale Tower. The rotor wash flattened my hair against my face. Through the window, I could see my father waiting by the elevator bank—a tall figure in a dark coat, flanked by two soldiers.
The last time I'd seen him, I'd been twenty-two and burning with conviction. *I don't need your name, Papa. I don't need your protection. I'm going to find real love.* He hadn't argued. He'd just looked at me with those tired, knowing eyes and said: *The door stays open, Seraphina. It will always stay open.*
Five years later, I was walking through it.
Don Vincenzo Vitale was not a man who hugged. When he saw my bandaged hand, he didn't pull me into his arms or tell me everything would be okay. He just looked at it—looked at my face, at the blood crusted under my fingernails, at the wedding dress I wasn't wearing—and his jaw tightened in a way that meant someone was going to die.
"Give me his name."
"It's handled, Papa."
"It's not handled if he's still breathing."
We stood in his office—floor-to-ceiling windows, the city glittering below us like a scattered handful of diamonds. The leather chair I'd spun in as a child. The desk I'd hidden under during meetings, pressing my hands over my mouth to stifle giggles while my father negotiated life and death.
I sat down. The chair still smelled like his cigars.
"I don't want him dead." My voice sounded far away, like it belonged to someone else. "I want him to live with what he did."
My father studied me for a long moment. His eyes—the same dark brown as mine—moved across my face, reading everything I wasn't saying. Then he nodded once. The Vitale equivalent of acceptance.
"Luca has been asking about you."
I closed my eyes. "Papa—"
"Six years." He said it quietly, without accusation. "He's waited six years. He never stopped asking. Even when I told him you'd run off with a dockworker."
Luca Bianchi. The arranged marriage I'd fled at twenty-two. I'd never met him. I'd seen photographs—a serious-faced young man with quiet eyes—but I'd been too young, too stubborn, too convinced that love couldn't be written into a contract, that my heart should choose, not my bloodline.
Five years with Dominic had taught me the market value of my heart's choices.
"Can I just sleep first?"
My father's expression softened—barely perceptible, a flicker at the corner of his mouth. "Your room is ready. Nothing's changed."
Everything had changed. But I was too tired to say it.
