Chapter 1
"Kiss it for me, sister…"
I had no idea the milk I drank every night was handmade by my foster brother, Luciano.
After I turned down his confession yet again, I stared at the milk he’d brought me so eagerly and knocked it to the floor in disgust.
The boy who’d always been quiet and obedient suddenly snapped.
He pinned me flat to the ground, his face inches from mine, his breath brushing my ear:"I get it. You want to drink fresher milk, don’t you?"
I never imagined the boy I’d raised all these years could spiral this far out of control with his twisted feelings for me.
So the very next day, I put him behind bars with my own two hands, determined to put an end to this messed-up obsession for good.
Five years later.
The wind whipping across the upstate New York prison yard was freezing, cutting right through my wool coat. I leaned against the hood of my beat-up sedan, staring at the towering barbed wire fences. The sky was the color of bruised iron.
The heavy iron gates groaned open.
He walked out.
My breath caught in my throat. I couldn't move. The broken boy I sent away was dead. The man walking toward me was Luciano Moretti, the long-lost heir to the city's most ruthless Mafia syndicate.
He wore a custom-tailored black leather jacket. The sleeves were rolled up just enough to expose his forearms in the freezing cold. Right there, etched into his pale skin, was the intricate, bloody crest of the Moretti family.
His jaw was sharper, covered in a dark shadow of stubble. And his shoulders were broader.
He didn't look surprised to see me waiting by the car. He didn't look angry. He looked at me the way you look at a pothole in the road—an inconvenience to step around.
"Luka," I said(the nickname I had given him since he was a boy). My voice cracked in the wind.
He stopped a few feet away. He didn't reach out. He pulled a heavy silver lighter from his pocket and lit a cigarette, shielding the flame with a scarred hand.
"It's Luciano now," he said. The words were flat. The smoke whipped away in the wind.
I swallowed hard, my throat feeling like sandpaper. "Luciano. I'm sorry."
He let out a short, emotionless laugh. He didn't even look at me when he spoke. "Don't be. You fed me and put a roof over my head for seven years, Evelyn. Five years in a cage is a fair trade. I was an adult. I did the crime, I did the time. We're even."
His casual dismissal felt like a physical blow to my chest. We're even.
Five years ago, Vincent Rourke cornered me in an alley. When Luka saw Rourke put his hands on me, he saw red. He beat Rourke until his skull fractured and he stopped breathing.
But as a Medical Examiner, I knew exactly how deep and lethal the roots of New York's crime families ran. If I had claimed self-defense, Luka would have walked free out of that precinct. And he would have been gunned down in the street within three days.
Vincent Rourke was the favored nephew of the Irish mob boss. The Irish mob's reach was everywhere. The police couldn't protect him. I couldn't protect him. The only place they couldn't get to him was deep inside the state's most secure penal system.
I risked my medical license, falsified documents, just to ensure he got placed in a segregated wing where Rourke's hitmen couldn't touch him.
To the rest of New York, it looked like the ultimate betrayal. A cold, calculated move by a ruthless professional to save her own pristine reputation.
I took the hatred. I took the blame. But I have no regrets, as long as I can protect Luka.
"Why didn't you let me see you?" I asked, pushing the memories down. "You rejected my visit."
"There was no point," he said, taking another slow drag. He checked his wrist. A heavy, diamond-encrusted Rolex caught the gray daylight. "I had nothing to say to you."
"Let's go home," I pleaded, stepping forward. I reached out, my fingers brushing the cold leather of his sleeve.
He shifted his weight instantly, pulling away as if I had burned him. My hand dropped into empty air.
"I'm not going back to that apartment, Evelyn."
He continued, his voice dropping an octave, vibrating with a dark warning. "I'm going back to the Moretti estate. I'm going to arrange my engagement."
The words didn't compute. My brain refused to process the syllables. I stared at him, the wind suddenly roaring in my ears, drowning out the prison alarms.
"Your what?"
"My engagement," he repeated, flicking the cigarette butt onto the frozen asphalt and crushing it beneath his boot. "I'm getting married."
A bomb went off in my skull. The ringing was deafening. I felt all the blood drain from my face.
"Luka, stop," I said, my voice rising in a desperate panic. "The Moretti family uses marriages as political leverage! It's a chessboard for territory and money. You just got out. You just stepped into their world..."
He looked down at me. For a split second, the dead water in his eyes shifted.
"Who said it was a family arrangement?" he asked softly.
I froze. My breath hitched. "What?"
"The family didn't set this up, Evelyn. I did." He leaned in closer. The smell of stale tobacco and expensive, unfamiliar cologne wrapped around me. "They didn't force me into anything. I chose her."
My chest tightened so hard my ribs felt like they were cracking. "Who?"
His lips curved into a razor-thin, mocking smile.
"Serena Vanderbilt."
Serena Vanderbilt...
The high-society heiress who had been obsessively chasing him since his college days.
