The first thing you learn about death in my family is that it's never private.
I stood at the edge of my father's grave, watching them lower his mahogany casket into the earth while three hundred of New York's most dangerous men paid their respects. The October rain had turned Calvary Cemetery into a sea of black umbrellas and darker intentions, but I felt every droplet that slipped past my coverage. Each one was ice against my skin, a reminder that I was still alive when Vittorio Rosetti don of the most powerful crime family in the city was not.
The priest's Latin prayers drifted over the gathering like smoke, meaningless words that couldn't fill the hole torn through my chest. "In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti..." Father Romano's voice wavered slightly as he spoke, and I wondered if it was emotion or fear that made his hands shake as he held the prayer book.
Fear had a way of spreading through crowds like this. Men who ruled the streets through violence and intimidation suddenly found themselves confronted with the one enemy they couldn't buy, threaten, or eliminate: death itself. If Vittorio Rosetti could be brought down, what did that mean for the rest of us?
"Bella." My godfather Marco's weathered hand settled on my shoulder, his voice barely audible above the priest's incantations. "È ora." It's time.
Time. As if grief operated on a schedule. As if the devastation of losing the only parent I had left could be packaged into neat segments of tradition and expectation. But I nodded anyway, stepping forward to take the handful of earth Father Romano offered me. The soil was dark and rich, nothing like the blood that had stained the marble floor of Torrino's restaurant where they'd found Papa three days ago.
My fingers trembled as I opened my palm, letting the dirt fall onto polished mahogany with soft, final thuds. The sound seemed to echo in the sudden silence that had fallen over the crowd, as if even the rain had paused to witness this moment.
"Riposa in pace, Papa," I whispered, the Italian rolling off my tongue like a prayer. Rest in peace. But even as the words left my lips, I knew there would be no peace. Not for him, and certainly not for me. The Rosetti name carried weight in this city the kind that crushed enemies and protected family. Now that weight was mine to bear.
I straightened my shoulders, feeling the collective gaze of three hundred men who were waiting to see what kind of leader Vittorio Rosetti's daughter would become. Some of their faces I'd known since childhood men who'd bounced me on their knees and taught me to play poker when I was eight. Others were strangers, representatives from allied families who'd come to pay respects and gauge the stability of our organization.
All of them were wondering the same thing: could a twenty-three-year-old woman hold together an empire that had taken her father thirty years to build?
The crowd began to disperse as the gravediggers took over, their shovels scraping against stone and earth with mechanical efficiency. I watched them work, hypnotized by the rhythmic sound, until something else caught my attention. Footsteps on wet grass, too measured to be mourners leaving, too deliberate to be anything but purposeful.
I turned my head slightly, not enough to seem obvious, just enough to see who was approaching from behind the stand of oak trees that bordered the cemetery. What I saw made my blood freeze in my veins despite the October chill.
Dante Moretti.
Even from fifty feet away, he was unmistakable. Six feet and two inches of expensive Italian tailoring and barely controlled violence, standing in the shadows like a dark angel come to witness my father's burial. His steel-gray eyes were fixed on me with an intensity that felt like a physical touch, and despite the distance between us, I could see the slight curve of his lips that might have been sympathy on any other man. On Dante Moretti, it looked like hunger.
The Morettis were our oldest enemies, a blood feud that stretched back three generations to when both families had fled Sicily for the promise of American opportunity. My great-grandfather had killed his great-grandfather over a shipment of bootleg whiskey during Prohibition, and the hatred had been refined and distilled through decades of territory wars, assassination attempts, and mutual destruction until it was purer than anything we'd ever smuggled through the Brooklyn docks.
Vincent Moretti—Dante's father—had been responsible for at least twelve attempts on Papa's life over the years. The scar along Papa's left temple was courtesy of a Moretti sniper's bullet that had missed its mark by half an inch. The limp he'd carried for the last five years came from a Moretti car bomb that had taken out his favorite restaurant and three of his best men.
And now the heir to that legacy of violence was watching me bury my father with eyes that seemed to catalog my every emotion, every sign of weakness.
"Figlio di puttana," Marco growled, following my gaze. The son-of-a-bitch comment was barely audible, but the fury in his voice was unmistakable. His hand moved instinctively toward his jacket, where I knew he kept a .38 special that had ended more lives than I cared to count. "Want me to handle this, principessa?"
"No." The word came out steadier than I felt, though my heart was hammering against my ribs like a caged bird. "This is neutral ground. Even the Morettis wouldn't be stupid enough to break that rule."
But as Dante stepped closer, never taking those predatory eyes off mine, I wondered if the old rules still applied. Papa's death had shifted the balance of power in ways I was only beginning to understand. Maybe the Morettis saw opportunity in my grief. Maybe they thought a Stanford-educated girl who'd spent more time in lecture halls than back alleys would be easier to eliminate than the man who'd held this city in an iron grip for three decades.
If they thought that, they were about to learn how wrong they could be.
The funeral crowd had thinned considerably, most of the mourners eager to escape the rain and the tension that seemed to thicken the air like fog. Only the core family members and closest associates remained, along with a scattering of soldiers whose job it was to watch for exactly the kind of threat that Dante Moretti represented.
I could feel their alertness ratchet up several notches as more figures emerged from the tree line. Vincent Moretti himself stepped into view, flanked by two men I didn't recognize but whose bearing screamed enforcer to anyone who knew what to look for. The elder Moretti looked healthier than he had any right to, considering he was supposed to be serving the eighth year of a twenty-five-year RICO sentence in federal prison.
Compassionate release, I'd heard through the network of whispers that served as our family's intelligence system. Terminal cancer, they'd said, though the man striding across the cemetery with predatory confidence looked anything but terminal. The federal system had a funny way of developing compassion when the right bribes changed hands.
"Isabella." Vincent's voice carried across the space between us, smooth as aged whiskey and twice as dangerous. The use of my full name instead of the nickname everyone else used was a deliberate choice a subtle assertion of dominance that made my skin crawl.
I turned to face him fully, keeping my expression carefully neutral. In our world, showing fear was tantamount to showing your throat to a wolf. "Vincent. This is... unexpected."
His smile was all teeth and no warmth, the kind of expression that had preceded the deaths of more men than I wanted to count. "I wanted to pay my respects to a worthy adversary. Your father was a remarkable man."
"He was my father." The correction came out sharper than I'd intended, but I was beyond caring about diplomatic niceties. "And his death doesn't change anything between our families."
"Doesn't it?" Vincent's pale eyes glittered with something that might have been amusement. "You're very young, Isabella. Very... inexperienced in the realities of this business. The wolves are already circling, and not all of them wear the name Moretti."
The implication hung in the air like a threat wrapped in silk. Other families, smaller organizations that had been kept in check by Papa's reputation and reach, would be testing our defenses soon. The Torrinos, the Castellanos, maybe even some of the Russian crews from Brighton Beach they'd all be watching to see if Vittorio Rosetti's empire would crumble without his iron fist to hold it together.
Before I could formulate a response that wouldn't start a war right there in the cemetery, Vincent was gone, melting back into the crowd of departing mourners with the practiced ease of a man who'd spent his life avoiding both bullets and handcuffs. I stood there staring after him, my heart hammering against my ribs, until Marco's urgent whisper broke through my shock.
"Bella, we need to go. Now."
I looked around, suddenly aware that most of the funeral guests had departed while I was distracted by the Moretti family reunion. The cemetery was nearly empty except for us, the gravediggers, and I spun back toward the tree line, searching for steel-gray eyes in the gathering dusk.
Dante was gone too.
The realization sent a chill down my spine that had nothing to do with the October rain. In our world, when enemies showed up at funerals, it usually meant one of two things: they were paying genuine respects, or they were scouting their next target. Given the conversation I'd just had with Vincent and the way Dante had watched me with those calculating eyes, I was betting on the latter.
"Isabella." Marco's voice was urgent now, his hand openly resting on his weapon as his eyes swept the perimeter for threats. "Car. Now."
I took one last look at my father's grave, at the mound of earth that covered the man who'd been the most powerful person in my world for twenty-three years, and made a silent promise that felt like a vow carved in stone.
I won't let them destroy what you built, Papa. Whatever it costs, whatever I have to become, I'll protect this family and honor your legacy.
Then I turned my back on the dead and walked toward the future, my heels clicking against wet stone with the rhythm of a funeral march. I didn't know that I was also walking toward the man who would either save me or damn me completely.
Sometimes, in our world, those two things were exactly the same.
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Author Note:
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