I looked at the man standing before me and did not recognize him. He was a stranger wearing my husband's face, speaking my husband's words, but hollow where it mattered. He hesitated, his jaw working as though searching for the right thing to say, some phrase that might bridge the distance between us. But nothing came. In the end, he simply squeezed my hand once, let it fall, and turned on his heel, disappearing back into the warmth and light of the Salvatore estate to tend to another woman.
My phone buzzed in the pocket of my coat. Jane Salvatore's message glowed on the screen.
You can come inside now. Earlier I just assumed things.
A second message followed almost immediately.
Let's not waste this dinner party.
I smiled through the tears that had begun to blur the words on the screen. A bitter, broken thing, that smile. Because in that moment I understood with perfect clarity that I had never once been welcomed in this household. Not truly. It had always been about status. About prestige. About what I could bring to the Salvatore name, and the answer, as far as they were concerned, had always been nothing.
Three years ago, I had been taken by mercenaries. Hired guns with no family allegiance, rogues who answered to no Commission and feared no code. They had snatched me from a car on a rain-slicked highway, and the world I knew had collapsed into darkness and concrete walls. My father, Don Vittorio Valducci, the Capo di tutti Capi, the most powerful man on the Eastern Seaboard, had torn the city apart searching for me. My brothers had not left a single stone unturned. Felix had personally ripped open the wreckage of a decoy vehicle with his bare hands, convinced I was inside. Giacomo had put a bounty on every mercenary crew from here to Chicago.
But my identity was never revealed. It couldn't be. To announce that the daughter of the Valducci Dynasty had been taken would have painted a target on my back that no amount of bodyguards could erase.
In the end, it was the young Don of the Jade Quarter, Xavier Salvatore, who found me. He and his men had raided the compound where I was being held alongside a dozen other captives, and he had carried me out into the daylight like something precious he'd pulled from the wreckage of the world.