Chapter 1
“Do not get into that car.”
The words escaped my mouth just as Alessandro Moretti stepped onto the mansion stairs.
Two guards turned toward me.
The stranger waiting beside the black Mercedes slid one hand beneath his coat.
And Alessandro slowly looked down at my fingers gripping the sleeve of his thousand-dollar suit.
Nobody touched Alessandro Moretti without permission.
Men had disappeared for less.
“Let go,” he said.
His voice was calm, but the courtyard seemed to shrink around us.
“If I am wrong, fire me.”
My hand was shaking so badly that I could feel it through the fabric.
“If I am right, you will still be alive tonight.”
His eyes changed.
Not with fear.
With calculation.
I pulled him behind the low stone wall beside the gatehouse before either guard could stop me.
For one terrifying second, I thought he might order them to shoot me.
Instead, he crouched beside me.
“You have ten seconds,” he said.
I pointed through a gap in the ivy.
“That is not Enzo.”
Alessandro stared at the driver.
The uniform was correct.
The black gloves were correct.
Even the silver Moretti emblem was pinned in the proper place.
But Enzo had driven Alessandro for twelve years.
The man beside the Mercedes was younger, shorter, and kept glancing toward the mansion door as though he was waiting for a signal.
“That proves nothing,” Alessandro said.
“Look at his left hip.”
A small bulge pressed beneath the driver’s coat.
A concealed gun.
Alessandro’s jaw tightened, but he still did not move.
Then I whispered, “Listen to the car.”
He listened.
The birds were singing.
Water moved in the courtyard fountain.
A delivery truck groaned somewhere beyond the gates.
But the Mercedes engine was silent.
Enzo never turned it off.
He once told Alessandro that a warm engine was a fast engine, and someday his boss might need to leave quickly.
For twelve years, the car had always been running before Alessandro reached the stairs.
That morning, it waited in complete silence.
His phone vibrated.
ISABELLA appeared on the screen.
His fiancée.
The woman who had slept beside him for fifteen years.
The woman wearing his ring.
The woman whose voice I had heard through the library door the night before.
“Answer it,” I whispered.
Alessandro turned his head toward me.
“You seem very comfortable giving orders.”
“If you do not answer, they will know you have seen something.”
That was when he noticed the word I had used.
They.
He answered.
“My love,” Isabella said warmly.
“The car is waiting.”
“I can see it.”
“You cannot be late for the council meeting.”
Alessandro looked through the ivy.
The false driver had taken one slow step toward the mansion.
“I am coming,” he said.
Then he ended the call.
His face showed nothing.
But his thumb moved across the gold watch that had belonged to his father.
“Who are they?” he asked.
I reached into my apron and removed my cracked phone.
The screen was held together with clear tape.
It looked ridiculous in the hand of a man who owned half the city.
“I was cleaning near the west library yesterday,” I said.
“The door was open.”
“I heard Mr. Damian speaking.”
Alessandro’s expression hardened.
Damian Ricci was not only his adviser.
He was the man Alessandro called brother.
I pressed play.
At first, only static came through the speaker.
Then Damian’s voice filled the space behind the wall.
“The council meeting is the cleanest moment.”
“Enzo will be removed.”
“My man will drive.”
“The tunnel cameras have already been disabled.”
“The car stops in the middle.”
“He never comes out.”
Alessandro did not blink.
Then Isabella spoke.
Her voice was soft.
Almost amused.
“Will he suffer?”
Damian answered without hesitation.
“Long enough to sign over the accounts.”
“And afterward?”
“The car goes into the bay.”
“You become the grieving fiancée.”
“I become regent.”
“Six months later, we marry.”
“The empire becomes ours.”
The recording should have ended there.
I almost wished it had.
Because the next thing Isabella said was not part of the murder plan.
It was far worse.
“He still trusts you because he has no idea what happened to his father.”
Alessandro’s hand closed around my phone.
His father had been killed twenty-two years earlier.
By his own adviser.
And according to Isabella, Damian knew something about that murder Alessandro had never been told.
A shadow moved behind us.
The false driver was no longer standing beside the Mercedes.
He was walking toward the wall.
One hand was still hidden beneath his coat.
Alessandro looked at me.
“Is that the entire recording?”
I shook my head.
“No.”
“There are eleven more minutes.”
“And the last voice on it does not belong to Isabella or Damian.”
May you like
The footsteps stopped on the other side of the wall.
Then a man Alessandro trusted more than anyone in the mansion quietly said his name.
