Chapter 1

Ten years ago, for Dante Russo, I turned down the political marriage my Family had arranged for me and gave up my claim as its heir.

Back then he was nothing but an illegitimate son with a price on his head, spat on by everyone.

I paid for his surgery, fed him money and information, helped him take the docks and clear out his enemies, and pushed him step by step into the seat of the Don of New York.

Then, the night before our wedding, he told me he had a mistress.

"The wedding can go ahead as planned. You will still be my only wife."

He laid out his terms calmly.

"But you have to accept her."

He assumed I had lost my Family's protection years ago, that I had no choice but to stay at his side.

It was not until I left that he found out everything he owned had rested on me.

Chapter 1

After the wedding rehearsal, Dante told me he intended to keep his mistress.

I was still in the fitted gown.

Four hundred walnut chairs stood in the ballroom of the Long Island estate, and every important member of the Russo Family in New York had confirmed they would attend.

The priest had just left, and the staff were adjusting the seating for the next day.

Dante stood in front of the altar, unhurriedly straightening his cufflinks.

"Vivian won't affect your position."

I thought I had misheard him.

"Who?"

"Vivian Hale," he said. "You met her at the charity dinner."

Of course I had.

She was young and beautiful, and she had a habit of tilting her head down when she spoke, a practiced kind of meekness.

Last month she had walked into my charity dinner on Dante's arm and explained that she had twisted her ankle and needed someone to lean on.

Dante told me then that she was only the daughter of an important political consultant.

"How long have you been sleeping with her?"

"Six months."

He did not hesitate.

I stared at him, and all at once the wedding dress felt so heavy I could not breathe.

After tomorrow I would be Dante's wife. The Russo Family was prepared to formally recognize me as Donna at the wedding.

I had spent ten years helping Dante take control of the underground casinos, the construction unions and the Brooklyn docks.

Now, on the eve of the wedding, he was telling me he had installed another woman at his side.

"Do you want to call off the wedding?" I asked.

"Just the opposite."

Dante stepped down from the altar and stopped in front of me.

"The wedding goes ahead. You are still my wife, and the only Donna of the Russo Family. Vivian gets none of that."

"Then what does she get?"

"Part of my time."

He said it as calmly as if he were assigning some unimportant piece of property.

"Lysa, this is a common arrangement in families like ours. You should learn to accept it."

I looked at his face.

Ten years ago, the first time I saw Dante, he was lying at the back door of an underground clinic in Brooklyn with two bullets in his stomach.

Marco Russo's men were hunting him across the whole city. No doctor would touch an illegitimate son the Don's family refused to acknowledge.

I registered him under my mother's surname and traded the diamond earrings my grandmother had left me for one surgery.

When Dante woke up, he took my hand and asked, "Why did you save me?"

I told him it was because I did not like watching other people decide whether a man deserved to live.

He did not even own a working gun then.

Now he ran the underground business of three boroughs, and he was trying to decide for me what kind of marriage I should accept.

"And if I don't accept it?"

Dante frowned slightly, as if my reaction disappointed him.

"I will give you the Manhattan apartment, two properties on Long Island, and enough money to live on for the rest of your life."

"And then?"

"And then we cancel the wedding."

"You think I can't survive without your money?"

"I think you need to be realistic."

He reached out and touched my face.

"You have been away from Italy for ten years. Your Family never came looking for you. Apart from me, there is no one in New York you can really lean on."

I knocked his hand away.

Dante's expression darkened.

"I haven't abandoned you. I'm giving you a choice."

The ballroom doors swung open.

Vivian walked in wearing a long silver dress, an emerald brooch pinned at her breast.

It was the one my mother had left me.

Five years ago Dante promised me I would not wear it again until our wedding day.

Vivian touched the brooch and gave me an apologetic smile.

"I hope you don't mind. Dante said the color suits me better."

I turned to look at Dante.

He did not tell her to take it off.

In that moment I understood that this was a betrayal he had been building for a long time.

He was testing how much of him I could stand.

Chapter 2

The next day there was no wedding.

Dante announced publicly that I was unwell and the ceremony had been postponed.

He never asked whether I agreed.

At ten in the morning I walked into the Russo Family conference room. The lieutenants sat along both sides of the long table, and Vivian had taken my chair.

She was still wearing my mother's brooch.

Dante sat at the head of the table and raised his eyes to me.

"You should be resting upstairs. You aren't needed here."

For seven years every set of dock accounts had passed through my review. Under Marco the Russo smuggling routes had been a mess. I redrew the shipping schedules, talked three dockworkers unions around for Dante, and found customs middlemen willing to cooperate.

Now he was telling me I was not needed here.

"Why is Vivian here?"

Vivian stood up at once.

"I'm only looking into the Family's income for the charitable foundation. If you'd rather I didn't, I can step out."

She said it and did not move.

Everyone was waiting for Dante to speak.

Dante closed the file in front of him.

"Vivian needs to understand the Russo Family. Sit down, Lysa."

"That is my seat."

"A chair doesn't decide who you are."

I almost laughed.

If chairs did not matter, he would not be giving orders from the head of the table.

"Get her out," I said.

The room went dead quiet.

Dante looked at me for a few seconds, then ordered everyone else out. Vivian lowered her voice as she passed me.

"At least he never asked me to prove I was worth something."

When the door closed, Dante stood up.

"You made a joke of yourself in front of everyone yesterday."

"I'm not the one who made the joke."

"You are going to be Donna. You cannot lose control over one woman."

"A woman wearing my dead mother's brooch and sitting in my seat?"

"I gave her the brooch."

His frankness left me with nothing to say for a moment.

"Why?"

"Because I want you to understand that some things aren't as important as you think they are."

I looked at the man I had loved for ten years and realized, truly, for the first time, that he knew exactly how to hurt me.

Dante had not changed overnight.

He simply had enough power now to stop hiding what he thought.

"Give me back the brooch."

"When you've calmed down."

"It belongs to me."

"It sits in the Russo safe, which makes it Russo property."

I slapped him.

The sound was very clear in that room.

Dante's face turned with the blow, and for a long moment he did not move.

Then he caught my wrist, hard enough to hurt.

"I'll let that go once," he said, "but you need to learn to obey the Don's decisions."

"Do you want a wife or a subordinate?"

"A proper Donna knows when not to challenge her husband."

That evening Vivian leaked the reason for the postponement to the press.

The story said nothing about Dante's betrayal. It said only that jealousy had left me emotionally unfit to go through with the wedding.

Dante pulled strings to have the coverage killed, and then demanded that I apologize to Vivian.

I refused.

He did not lose his temper. He simply had a lawyer bring me a document.

It was the deed transfer for the safe house on the Brooklyn shore.

Back when Marco was hunting him, the two of us hid there for four months. We repaired every board in that house ourselves. He told me once that even if he lost every business he had, that place would always be our home.

The document listed the new owner as Vivian Hale.

The lawyer looked at me. "Mr. Russo says that once you learn to accept reality, he will stop disposing of the assets the two of you hold together."

I took the document.

I finally understood that this was not some passing appetite for something new.

He meant to take away the things I cared about one by one, until I bowed to him.

Chapter 3

Over the next two weeks Dante revoked my Family security clearance.

I could not enter the harbor control room, I could not look at the quarterly accounts, and I could not give orders to Russo guards directly.

He told everyone I needed to rest and recover from my emotional problems before the wedding.

Vivian took my place hosting the children's hospital charity dinner that had always been mine.

That night she wore my mother's brooch and stood beside Dante for the photographers.

I did not attend.

I sat in the study of the estate, reading a shipping report nobody had bothered with.

For three days running, unfamiliar vehicles had been seen near Pier 6. Two dockworkers had abruptly taken leave, and a freighter registered to carry olive oil had arrived twelve hours early.

Every sign said someone was preparing to hit the port.

I called Gabriel.

"Pull our people off Pier 6 immediately."

There were a few seconds of silence on the other end.

"Dante has forbidden us to take orders from you."

"Tell him there are weapons hidden on that ship."

Half an hour later Dante called back.

The music at the dinner was loud behind him, and his voice was plainly impatient.

"I've seen the report. That ship belongs to the Conti family."

"The registered company changed owners three days ago."

"Where are you getting your information?"

"That doesn't matter."

"It matters a great deal. You no longer have clearance to investigate Russo shipping."

I gripped the phone.

"Dante, if you don't pull them out, people are going to die."

"Tonight is Vivian's first public appearance for the foundation. And you pick tonight to invent an attack."

I froze.

"You think I'm competing for your attention?"

"I think you need to stop interfering."

He hung up.

I took a gun and drove to Brooklyn alone.

Ten years ago I had carried him off those same docks, half dead. He lay across the back seat and told me, barely conscious, that if he survived he would never let me face danger alone again.

Pier 6 had no lights.

I smelled gasoline the moment I got out of the car.

"Everybody out!" I shouted into the warehouse. "There's a bomb on that ship!"

The first shot came from behind the containers.

I hit one of the attackers and dragged a wounded worker behind a concrete wall. An explosion went up inside the warehouse, and the flames ran along the spilled gasoline toward the cargo crates.

Gabriel finally arrived with men.

I helped them open the east exit and get the trapped workers out. As the last one left, a second wave of attackers came through the dock entrance.

A bullet grazed my side.

The pain dropped me to my knees.

I pressed my hand over the wound, and the blood kept coming through my fingers. A few minutes later Dante arrived, Vivian behind him, still in her evening gown.

Another shot cracked out.

Dante threw himself at her and pulled her behind the car.

He did not even look at me first.

Gabriel ran to me and his face changed instantly.

"Lysa, you're losing a lot of blood."

I looked down.

The blood was not only coming from my side.

The hem of my dress was soaked through.

Before they lifted me into the ambulance, I heard Dante barking at his men to protect Vivian.

And it came to me, suddenly, that I had not bled in two months.

Chapter 4

When I woke up, the doctor told me the baby had not survived.

The room in the private hospital was very quiet. Outside the window the Hudson lay gray, and the monitors beeped at even intervals.

"About nine weeks along," the doctor said. "The gunshot didn't hit the uterus directly, but the shock and the blood loss caused the miscarriage."

I stared at the ceiling and did not cry.

The doctor opened an older file.

"There was already serious damage from the accident five years ago. After this, the chance of conceiving naturally again will be lower still."

Five years ago I had lost a child too.

Dante was not Don yet then.

To find the witness Marco had bought off, I deliberately drew away the car tailing us and was hit on an overpass in Queens.

When I woke, Dante was on his knees at the side of the bed, holding my hand, crying for a long time.

He promised he would end the fighting and give me a safe home, and promised he would never let me be hurt because of him again.

I never told him that the day before the crash I had just confirmed I was pregnant.

He was preparing the most critical operation of his life. I was afraid the news would distract him.

Later the doctors told us the baby was gone. Dante stayed with me at the hospital for a full month.

Now we had lost another child.

This time he did not walk into my room until the following afternoon.

"Why didn't you tell me you were pregnant?"

That was the first thing he said.

"I didn't know."

Dante stood by the bed, haggard. He reached out to touch me and I turned my face away.

"The report on the docks was right," I said.

"I know."

"If you had listened to me, they could have gotten out in time."

"You shouldn't have gone there alone either."

"So this is my fault?"

"I didn't say that."

"You're saying it right now."

Dante was quiet for a moment, and his voice went stiff.

"Lysa, you knew you had no clearance and you acted anyway. If you had stayed at the estate, none of this would have happened."

I finally turned to look at him.

"You're blaming me for saving your men?"

"I'm telling you that disobeying orders has consequences."

He paused.

"The child came at the wrong time. We are dealing with a great deal of trouble right now. At least from now on you'll remember not to act on your own judgment."

I looked at him for a long time.

Over those two weeks I had cried, I had raged, I had gone over our ten years again and again. I used to believe that as long as Dante still had a little love left in him, we could work it out.

Now I no longer needed an answer.

"Send in the lawyer," I said.

"You need rest."

"I want to cancel the wedding."

Dante's expression finally changed.

"Don't say things you don't mean, not now."

"I mean it."

I pulled off the engagement ring and set it on the bedside table.

"Dante, I am not marrying you, and I am not taking your properties or your compensation. We're finished."

He stared at the ring, and his face grew darker.

"You have no Family now, no security, not even a steady income. Where do you plan to go?"

"That's not your concern."

"You can't manage without New York."

"That's my business."

He leaned down, both hands braced on the edge of the bed.

"You'll come back. We'll talk again when you've calmed down."

"No, we won't."

Dante gave a cold laugh. He clearly did not believe me.

Three days later I left the hospital with the lawyer.

I took only my passport, a few clothes and a photograph of my mother.

Before I left New York, I sent a message to a number that had been silent for ten years.

"Withdraw all covert protection from Dante Russo. As of today the Moretti Family no longer provides him with funding, intelligence or harbor access."

The answer came back quickly.

"Understood, Miss Alexandra."

It was the first time in ten years that anyone had spoken my real name.