The boss didn't blink. He reached out, his ink-stained fingers brushing the loose strands of hair away from my forehead, his touch terrifyingly gentle yet completely immovable. "A ghost doesn't know her own reflection, maybe," he murmured, his breath hot against my temple. "Look at the corner of your left eye. The faint crescent scar. My wife got it falling off a horse in Sicily when she was twelve. You have it, too. Down to the millimeter."

Dante hauled me up by the elbow, pulling me through a hidden service door behind the kitchen that led straight out into a damp, dark alleyway. A sleek, armored black SUV was already idling against the curb, its doors flung open. We tumbled inside, the heavy doors slamming shut with a vault-like thud that cut off the outside world.

As the vehicle sped away into the labyrinth of city streets, the interior was illuminated only by the amber glow of the dashboard lights.

"Where are you taking me?" I demanded, my voice shaking with a mixture of terror and white-hot adrenaline. "You can't just kidnap me! I have a life, I have bills—"

"You have a lie," Dante interrupted, his voice flat, chillingly calm. He sat across from me, cradling his son now that the baby had finally drifted to sleep against his chest. "Your mother told you to run from dragons. Did she ever tell you why?"

I froze. The memory of my mother’s tear-stained face on my eighteenth birthday flashed through my mind. 'If you see men with dragons, run, Mara. They take everything.'

"She said... she said bad men killed my family in the old country," I whispered.

"Your mother lied to keep you safe," Dante said, pulling a worn, leather-bound journal from his inner pocket and tossing it onto my lap. "Open it."

With trembling fingers, I flipped the cover open. The first page was written in messy, frantic handwriting I recognized instantly—it was my mother’s hand. Inside were photographs. Photographs of me as an infant, wrapped in a blanket bearing the Moretti family crest. And beside me in the photos, looking down with a smile that matched mine down to the dimple, was the woman from the restaurant wall.

"Elena Moretti," Dante said softly, staring out the tinted window at the neon blur of the city. "My wife. Assassinated in our villa on a stormy night two years ago. Her body was never found in the wreckage. Or so they told me." He turned his heavy, haunted gaze back to me. "A mother doesn't abandon her newborn son unless she's forced into hiding. And a dead woman doesn't leave behind a daughter who grows up to look precisely like her, hiding in plain sight as a waitress in the poorest district of the city."

I dropped the journal as if it were burning hot. "No. No, that's impossible. I'm just Mara. I grew up in a trailer park three states away! My mother raised me!"

"Your mother was Elena's twin sister—your aunt," Dante corrected quietly, the final piece of the nightmare clicking into place. "She took you and hid you to protect you from the syndicate war that nearly wiped out our bloodline. But they found out. And tonight, they found you through him."