Chapter 1 - The Strawberry Stain and the Walnut Desk
The first time Lily Harper spoke directly to Dante Valenti, she asked him to teach her how to become strong enough to hurt a grown man. She was five years old. She was wearing a yellow dress with a strawberry-shaped juice stain near the hem, one sock, and no shoes. A stuffed rabbit with a missing button eye hung beneath her arm. Dante was sitting behind a walnut desk in his private library forty-eight floors above Manhattan, reading numbers that could decide whether men kept jobs, lost businesses, or disappeared from his world entirely. Lily planted both fists on her hips.
“Mr. Dante?” she asked.
He looked over the top of the document. “Yes?”
She studied the muscles beneath his rolled-up sleeves. “How can I get muscles like you?”
Dante stared at her. Lily continued, deadly serious, “I need to protect my mommy.”
For several seconds, Dante Valenti—thirty-nine years old, head of a criminal organization his father had left behind, a man whose name could empty a restaurant table faster than a fire alarm—did not know what to say. Then he laughed. Not cruelly. It escaped him before he could stop it, a rusty sound from somewhere he had apparently forgotten existed. Lily frowned. “This isn’t funny.”
That stopped him. The library door opened. Emma Harper rushed inside wearing her housekeeping uniform, her blond hair coming loose from its knot. “Lily!”
The terror on her face did not match the crime. She grabbed her daughter gently by the shoulders. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Valenti. She was supposed to stay in the staff room.”
“It’s okay,” Dante said.
“No, sir. It isn’t.” Her hands were trembling. Dante noticed. Emma had worked in his residence for eleven weeks. She was thirty-one, widowed, quiet, reliable, and almost aggressively invisible. She never asked questions, never opened doors she was told to leave closed, never stayed in a room when men in suits arrived, and cleaned around secrets without appearing curious about them. That was why Dante had approved her employment.
Yet now she looked as if Lily had walked into a cage with a tiger. Lily twisted around in her mother’s arms. “But he needs to know, Mommy.”
Emma went white. “Know what?” Dante asked.
May you like
“Nothing,” Emma answered too quickly. She pulled Lily toward the door.
Dante watched them leave. Just before the door shut, Lily looked back. Her face no longer looked childish; it looked worried. Dante did not read another line for twenty minutes. His penthouse was protected by cameras, coded elevators, reinforced glass, and a security staff of fourteen. Why would a five-year-old believe her mother needed protection inside it?
