(Isabella POV)
My father was a man of bad debts and worse secrets. I'd known this since I was old enough to add up grocery bills faster than he could bluff his way through a poker hand. But nothing prepared me for the night the Torrinos came whispering at our door.
The apartment felt smaller that evening, suffocating in its familiar decay. Steam hissed from the ancient radiator like a dying animal, and beneath its metallic wheeze I caught another sound—the frantic scratching of pen on paper. Numbers. Always numbers with him.
I found Marco hunched over the kitchen table, ledger spread open like autopsy results. His shirt collar was damp with sweat despite the October chill seeping through our cracked windows. The overhead bulb cast harsh shadows across his face, carving years into skin that had aged decades in months.
"Papà?"
His head snapped up, eyes wild as a cornered rat. Those same dark eyes I'd inherited, now bloodshot and darting toward exits that didn't exist. The ledger slammed shut with the finality of a coffin lid.
But I'd seen enough. Names I recognized from the neighborhood—Mrs. Castellano who ran the corner market, Old Tony from the barbershop. And beside each name, numbers that made my stomach drop. Skimmed amounts. Stolen trust.
And there, at the bottom in red ink like dried blood: Torrino - $47,000.
"Madonna mia," I whispered.
The Torrinos weren't just another crime family. They were the darkness between streetlights, the silence that followed screams. Leonardo Torrino's name lived in the city's bones—carved there with bullets and fear. Children learned not to speak it above a whisper. Grown men crossed themselves when they heard it on the wind.
"Isabella, you shouldn't—" His voice cracked like thin ice.
"How much?" The words fell from my lips sharp as broken glass. "How much do you owe them?"
Marco's hands trembled as he reached for his cigarettes, a gesture as automatic as breathing. The flame from his lighter painted his face in hellish orange before dying back to shadow.
"It's not what you think."
"Don't." I crossed my arms, nails biting into my palms. "Don't you dare lie to me. Not about this. Not about them."
He took a long drag, smoke curling around the overhead light like incense at a funeral. When he finally spoke, his voice was barely audible above the radiator's death rattle.
"Your mother's treatments... the experimental ones in Manhattan. Insurance won't cover—"
"So you stole from Leonardo Torrino?" The name tasted like copper on my tongue. "Are you insane?"
"I was going to pay it back!" The cigarette trembled between his fingers. "One good night at the tables, just one—"
"They'll kill you." The words came out flat, matter-of-fact. Because that's what the Torrinos did. It's what they were known for. "They'll kill all of us."
Something shifted in his face then. For a moment, I glimpsed the man he used to be—the one who'd carried me on his shoulders through Sunday markets, who'd promised me the world when we barely had rent money. But that man was drowning, pulled under by currents of desperation and dice.
"I had no choice," he whispered, ash falling from his cigarette like snow. "She's dying, Isabella. My Lucia is dying, and I can't—I won't watch her waste away when there's something that might help."
The apartment seemed to tilt around me. Love. Twisted, desperate love had driven him to sign his own death warrant. Because that's what you did when you stole from the Torrinos—you wrote your name in their blood-ledger and waited for them to come collecting.
"There has to be another way—"
He stood so abruptly his chair toppled backward, clattering against the linoleum like bones. His fists clenched and unclenched as if he could squeeze salvation from the air.
"I'll fix it. Tonight. I'll fix everything tonight."
"Papà, what are you talking about? Where are you going?"
But he was already reaching for his coat, that threadbare brown thing that smelled of cigarettes and broken promises. The door slammed behind him before I could grab his arm, leaving me alone with the echo and the terrible certainty that I'd just watched my father walk toward his own execution.
The hours crawled by like wounded things. I tried to distract myself—washing dishes that were already clean, organizing books that would never be read again. But every sound from the street sent electricity through my nerves. Footsteps. Car doors. The distant wail of sirens that might already be coming for us.
The neighborhood whispered its secrets through thin walls. The Torrinos kept records, they said. A blood-ledger written in permanent ink. Every name that went in came out in obituaries. Some were found floating in the Hudson with their hands bound behind their backs. Others simply vanished, as if the city had swallowed them whole.
My father's name was in that book now. I could feel it like a splinter under my skin.
I pictured him walking into the lion's den. Leonardo Torrino's private office—they said it was all marble and shadows, a cathedral built for confessions extracted at gunpoint. The desk where he sat had seen more blood than a battlefield. No one walked into that room and walked out unchanged.
No one stole from him and lived.
The clock on the wall ticked past midnight, each second a countdown to disaster. Then I heard it—the scrape of a key in the lock, unsteady and desperate.
"Papà?"
The door opened on a nightmare.
He stumbled inside, shirt soaked through with sweat and something darker. Blood streaked his sleeve, painted his collar in abstract patterns of violence. His face was the color of old bone, eyes wide and unfocused like a man who'd seen his own ghost.
And in his trembling, bloody hand dangled a delicate gold chain.
A locket.
Even in the dim light, I could see it wasn't ours. This wasn't some trinket from the pawnshop or flea market find. The gold caught the overhead bulb's weak glow, unmarked by time or wear. Expensive. Personal. Sacred.
Etched into its surface were initials I couldn't make out, but I didn't need to. I knew with the cold certainty of a blade against my throat exactly where he'd gotten it.
"Dio mio," I breathed.
My father's bloody fingers closed around the locket like it might save him, like it might erase what he'd done. But all I could see was death coming for us on silent feet, and his name already written in permanent ink.
The blood-ledger had a new entry tonight.
And we were all going to pay for it.