Chapter 1 - The Blue Paper Star
The chill in the foyer was not from the October draft off Boston Harbor; it radiated from the marble beneath my boots and the ice calcifying around my heart. Yet, resting in the center of my scarred, calloused palm was that crumpled scrap of blue construction paper, trimmed with blunt safety scissors and warm from the pocket of a toddler’s cardigan.
"Hold this instead," Elsie repeated, her small voice ringing clear against the vaulted ceilings where normally only whispers dared travel.
Behind her, Margaret, her sixty-year-old grandmother and my family’s housekeeper since the days of my father, looked as though she were about to collapse. Her hand clutched her apron, her breath trapped in her throat. She had witnessed the aftermath of my wrath before—she knew that men who crossed Gabriel Rinaldi rarely walked out of the harbor district without broken bones or hollow eyes.
I did not move. I could not.
Thirty years ago, on an unpaved road in South Boston before the high-rises and armored convoys, my younger sister Sophia had cut stars from construction paper while our father yelled behind closed doors. Sophia had been fragile, born with a weak heart that the doctors said would not survive winter, yet her spirit had been boundless. Whenever my knuckles bruised from fighting the neighborhood bullies who mocked our poverty, she would pry my bleeding fingers open with her delicate hands.
“Don’t squeeze, Gabe. You’ll hurt yourself. Hold this instead.”
Sophia had died the night before my eighteenth birthday, clutching a paper star while the city’s private clinics refused her entry because our surname meant nothing. That was the night Gabriel Rinaldi died, and the monster took his place. I made a vow to build an empire so vast, so terrifying, that no one would ever slam a door in my face again.
Now, looking down into Elsie’s innocent brown eyes, the bloodlust that had consumed me during the ride back from the downtown docks suddenly thinned like morning fog.
"Mr. Gabriel?" Elsie tilted her head, noticing the moisture gathering at the corners of my eyes. "Is it working?"
I swallowed hard, forcing the lump in my throat down into the dark abyss where I kept my humanity locked away. I crouched slowly, the fabric of my thousand-dollar trousers straining as my knees touched the polished stone floor. I leveled my gaze with hers, keeping my fingers gently curved around her fragile gift.
"Yes, little one," I murmured, my voice raspy and foreign to my own ears. "It works."
Margaret rushed forward, her slippers shuffling hurriedly across the floor. "Mr. Rinaldi, I am so sorry! I told her to stay in the sunroom! She didn't mean to bother you, sir, please don't—"
May you like
I raised my left hand, a silent gesture that had once halted firing squads. Margaret froze mid-sentence, trembling.
"She didn't bother me, Margaret," I said softly, standing back up to my full height. "Take her upstairs. Give her whatever dessert she wants from the kitchen. And tell Thomas to bring a double scotch to my study."
