"She's not just the daughter of some mistress—she's the reason my mother is dead. And you expect me to kneel and beg her forgiveness?!" The words tore from my throat like shrapnel.
Piper didn't even have time to part her painted lips. Colino's eyes went glacial—the cold, flat stare of a man who'd learned to kill his emotions long before he'd learned to kill anything else.
"I warned you," he said, his voice like steel dragged across frozen stone. "Don't test my patience."
Then he turned to his soldiers and issued the order with the casual cruelty of a man born into blood. "Go to the funeral home. Bring her mother's body back here."
Every word was a blade dipped in venom.
"She won't learn until she's broken." His lip curled with contempt as he looked at me—looked through me. "You think someone like you deserves to stand as the Donna of the Marconi Family?"
"Feed the corpse to the dogs." He meant every syllable.
His crew moved without hesitation, their heavy footsteps echoing through the marble foyer like a death march. These weren't men who questioned orders. These were soldiers who'd buried bodies in unmarked graves and slept soundly after.
"No! No, please!" I lunged forward in blind panic—only to be seized by another enforcer. His grip crushed my arm with practiced brutality. I heard the crack before I felt it.
Agony exploded through me like wildfire consuming dry brush.
Tears blurred the ornate ceiling into smears of gold and shadow. I cried so hard I couldn't draw breath, couldn't think, couldn't do anything but beg.
"Colino, please! Don't do this to my mother. She's—she's already gone. Isn't that enough?!"
Piper tilted her head with saccharine sweetness, barely concealing the triumph curving at the corners of her mouth.
"Colino… the dead deserve their rest. Perhaps we should show mercy?"
He turned to her with a theatrical sigh, his hand finding the small of her back with easy possession. "You're too soft, cara mia. That's why she walks all over you."
Then his attention snapped back to his men, who had paused at the threshold. "Well? What are you waiting for? Do I need to draw you a map to the funeral home?" The bark of command echoed off the walls of the Marconi estate like a gunshot.
His voice cut through me like shattered glass, scattering the last fragments of the love I'd clung to for ten desperate years.
He knew. He knew my mother was my only weakness—the single soft place in my armor. And he didn't hesitate to drive the knife straight through it.
I broke.
I bowed.
My spine bent, my head dropped, my pride bled out onto the cold marble floor at Piper's designer heels.
"Please," I whispered, tears falling in hot rivers down my cheeks. "Please just leave my mother in peace. Let her rest."
Each word was a razor in my throat. "I'm sorry. I was wrong."
Wrong for hoping for fairness in a world built on blood debts.
Wrong for believing—foolishly, pathetically—that maybe, just maybe, he'd choose me over her.
As I bent forward in supplication, the blood-soaked collar of my dress pulled away from my skin, exposing the wounds beneath.
Colino's eyes flickered. For a split second, something human surfaced in those dark depths—surprise, perhaps, or the ghost of the boy he'd once been.
"Is this enough for you?" I straightened with every last ounce of strength left in my shattered body, meeting his gaze with disgust I could barely contain behind my teeth.
His jaw tightened. He gestured sharply to his consigliere's assistant. "Bring the agreement."
Only when I pressed my bloody fingerprint onto the document—transferring my stakes in the Family's legitimate fronts, signing away my mother's legacy—did the tension finally ease from his brow.
"You're bleeding," he observed, as if noticing the weather. "I'll send for a doctor."
He released Piper and moved toward me, reaching out with the hand that had once cradled my face like I was something precious.
I slapped it away.
"Save your concern for your precious comare," I spat. "Better hurry—wait any longer and those theatrical bruises might fade before anyone important sees them."
I turned to leave, my vision swimming, my legs threatening to buckle.
Piper's foot shot out with serpentine precision.
I tripped hard, crashing forward toward the unforgiving marble.
Colino's instincts fired—the reflexes of a man trained since childhood to protect what was his. He reached out—
Then stopped himself. His hand froze inches from my falling body.
He stepped back.
"Fine." His voice was ice. "Handle your wounds yourself."
I forced myself upright, swallowing the scream that clawed at my throat as pain lanced through every nerve.
He watched me from the elevator threshold, Piper tucked possessively against his side. "I'll accompany you to select your gown tomorrow," he said, as if we were discussing dinner reservations. "The alliance ceremony won't plan itself."
The gilded elevator doors slid closed on his impassive face.
My body swayed, the dizziness from blood loss rising in nauseating waves. The chandelier above fractured into a thousand spinning diamonds.
In the blur of agony, memory dragged me backward—back to a different time. Back to when we were young and the world hadn't yet taught us its cruelest lessons.
Colino was just nineteen when his father began grooming him to inherit the Family. He'd worked through endless nights learning the business—both legitimate and otherwise—his eyes perpetually rimmed with exhaustion. One evening, I burned my hand while making soup for him in the estate's kitchen. Just a small blister, barely worth mentioning.
Yet somehow, he found out. He stormed out of a sit-down with three capos and drove home like the devil himself was chasing him, running every red light between the social club and the compound.
He grabbed my hand and cradled it like I was made of spun glass.
"I'm so sorry, tesoro. I should've protected you," he said, his voice rough with guilt. "I swear on my mother's grave—as long as I'm breathing, I'll never let anything hurt you again."
Then he pulled me into his arms. Warm. Strong. Trembling just slightly with the force of his conviction. That embrace—and that blood oath—had branded themselves into my memory like a scar.
But that boy was long dead.
He'd grown into a cold, calculating man who looked at me like I was nothing. Like I was disposable. Like I was a loose end waiting to be tied off.
Now, he was the one hurting me the most.
I stumbled toward the estate's side entrance, the one the servants used. The edges of my vision darkened, collapsing inward like a dying star.
But before I hit the ground—I fell into someone's arms.
A stranger's arms. Firm and unfamiliar, smelling of expensive tobacco and something darker. Something dangerous.
Before the blackness swallowed me whole, I heard a single whisper against the shell of my ear—a voice like smoke and shadows.
"Do you want revenge?"
The words curled around me like a devil's bargain, offered at the crossroads of desperation and death.
"In exchange for those stakes you just signed away… I'll help you find the proof of who really killed your mother."
