534 A Mafia Boss looked down on his maid after catching her sneaking leftover food out of his mansion. But when he secretly followed her through Chicago’s freezing streets, he uncovered someone his own empire had declared dead twelve years earlier—and in that moment, every lie he had ever believed began to unravel.

The door swung fully open, slamming against the rotten drywall.

Standing in the doorway, illuminated by the dim light of the corridor, was Lorenzo Vale. Behind him stood four of my heavy hitters, their silenced pistols already drawn and pointed into the room.

Lorenzo wasn't wearing his usual dutiful, subservient expression. His mouth was twisted into a cold, triumphant sneer, his eyes dark and calculating.

"I have to admit, Michael," Lorenzo said, his voice smooth and dripping with malice. "I didn't think you had it in you to follow a maid through a blizzard. You were always too arrogant to care about the little people. It seems grief softened your mind after all."

I slowly stood up from the floor, placing myself firmly between Lorenzo's men and the two women behind me. The shock and grief that had paralyzed me moments ago instantly burned away, replaced by an incandescent, deadly rage.

"Lorenzo," I said softly, my hand creeping inside my coat toward my firearm. "You forged my name. You told my sister I wanted her dead."

Lorenzo chuckled, a dry, grating sound. "Your father was a weak man, Michael. He wanted to split the Moretti empire between you and Clara. A woman! Can you imagine? The captains would have revolted within six months. So I took initiative."

"You tried to murder her," I growled.

"I tried to make her run," Lorenzo corrected smoothly. "And it worked brilliantly. I used your ring—which I stole from your desk while you were in New York—to intimidate her. Salvatore caught on to my game and tried to spirit her out of the city, so I blew up her car. I was disappointed to learn later that Salvatore had managed to pull her out alive, but it didn't matter. She was terrified of you. She spent twelve years living like a rat in the dark, convinced her loving brother was hunting her."

Clara let out a strangled sob behind me, the full horror of twelve years of unnecessary torment crushing down upon her.

"And what about me?" I asked, keeping Lorenzo's eyes locked on mine while calculating the distance between us. "You used my grief to start a war."

"Of course I did!" Lorenzo laughed. "A grieving, angry twenty-three-year-old kid is so easy to manipulate. You wiped out all my rivals. You consolidated the entire Midwest under the Moretti name. You built a billion-dollar machine, Michael. And you handed me the keys while you drowned in your own brooding guilt."

"And tonight?" I asked.

"Tonight, Beatrice ruined everything by stealing a plastic container of cold beef," Lorenzo sneered, glaring at Beatrice, who was shrinking back against the wall. "If she hadn't brought you here, Clara would have died quietly of pneumonia in a few weeks, and you would have remained my golden puppet forever. But now... now you know the truth."

Lorenzo raised his custom silver revolver, aiming it directly at my chest.

"A tragedy, really," Lorenzo sighed, theatrical sorrow in his voice. "The great Michael Moretti, killed in an abandoned tenement by rival gang members while trying to rescue his long-lost sister. I will avenge you both, of course. And then I will take total control of the family."

"You think four men are enough to take me down, Lorenzo?" I said, every muscle in my body coiling like a steel spring. "You built my empire, but you forgot who did the killing."

"Kill them all," Lorenzo ordered coldly. "Leave no body intact."

Before the gunman on Lorenzo's left could raise his weapon, I lunged.

I didn't draw my gun—there wasn't time. I grabbed the gunman’s wrist, twisting it violently until the bone snapped through the leather of his jacket. The gun went off, the silenced shot embedding itself into the ceiling. I yanked his body in front of me just as the second guard opened fire, using the first guard as a human shield.

Bullets ripped into the dead man's vest. I drew my own pistol from my waistband and fired three rapid shots over the corpse's shoulder.

Two guards dropped instantly, blood spraying across the hallway walls.

Lorenzo cursed, firing two wild shots into the room before spinning on his heel and sprinting back down the corridor toward the exit.

"Beatrice! Grab Clara!" I roared over the deafening noise of gunfire in the enclosed space.

I fired two more rounds down the hall, forcing the remaining guard to dive for cover behind a doorframe. I reached back, grabbed Clara's blanket-wrapped frame in one arm, and hauled her up against my chest. She weighed almost nothing—a horrifying testament to years of malnutrition.

"Can you walk?!" I shouted at Beatrice.

"Yes!" she screamed, her eyes wide with terror, but she held tight to my coat.

"Stay right behind me!"

I moved through the smoke-filled hallway like a hurricane, clearing the exit with my weapon trained on every shadow. We burst out of the dilapidated building into the blinding, freezing blizzard outside.

Down the street, the taillights of Lorenzo's armored SUV were already speeding away into the dark, kicking up a cloud of white snow.

He was heading back to the mansion. He was going to initiate a lockdown, tell the captains I was dead, and turn my own army against me.

I looked down at Clara, who was shivering violently in my arms, her face pale and her breathing ragged. Beatrice stood beside us, trembling from the cold and the shock of what had just transpired.

I didn't have my army. I didn't have my mansion. I had a gun with four bullets left, a dying sister, and a brave maid who had risked everything for a bowl of leftovers.

"Michael..." Clara gasped, clutching my lapels with her thin fingers. "He's going to kill everyone who loyal to you..."