Chapter two
667 Words
DANTE
She was even more beautiful up close.
I watched Sienna Valentino disappear into the armored Mercedes, her brother's hand possessive on her back. Another piece of Valentino property, carefully guarded. She had no idea who I was. No idea that the man she had just smiled at had been planning her family's destruction for five years. No idea that her father killed mine.
"Did you get what you needed?" Alessandro's voice crackled through my earpiece.
I turned away from the curb, heading toward my own car parked three blocks away. I couldn't risk being seen leaving at the same time as the Valentinos. "Better. She gave me her attention voluntarily. The setup worked perfectly."
"The forged sculpture?"
"She identified it immediately. Smart girl." I filed that away. Intelligence would make this harder, but more satisfying. "But she announced it publicly anyway, even though it embarrassed her family."
My brother was quiet for a moment. "That doesn't sound like a Valentino."
No, it didn't. Valentinos protected their own, lied to protect the empire, put family above everything. Sienna had just chosen professional integrity over loyalty.
A weakness I could exploit.
"She took my card," I continued, sliding into my car. The driver, one of Alessandro's men, pulled into traffic. "She'll call."
"You sound confident."
I was. I had seen the way she looked at me. Not with the entitled interest of a mafia princess slumming with the help, but with genuine curiosity. Loneliness, even. And when I defended her against Dmitri, her surprise was real. She wasn't used to people protecting her without orders.
"She's isolated," I said. "Controlled by her father, managed by her brothers."
"And you're going to take it away." Alessandro's voice was flat. "Seduce her, get close to the family, find out where they're vulnerable."
"That's the plan."
"Can you do it? She's Vincent Valentino's daughter. Everything we've lost, everyone we've buried. Her family did that."
I thought of my father's funeral. My mother's face six months later when the cancer diagnosis came. The construction workers who burned with him, their families paid off into silence.
"She's a tool," I said.
Alessandro seemed satisfied. "Good. We're meeting tomorrow to review the business situation. Don Valentino's expansion into our territory is getting aggressive. We need leverage, and the daughter might be exactly that."
After we hung up, I sat in silence as London passed by outside the window. I pulled out my phone and opened the photo gallery, scrolling back five years to the pictures I kept for exactly this purpose.
My father's funeral. My mother's face, destroyed by grief. The newspaper clipping about the "accidental" building fire that killed Nikolai Russo and eleven other workers.
The fire report I had stolen from the investigator's office, showing evidence of arson. The witness statement that was never filed, from a construction worker who saw Vincent Valentino's men tampering with the electrical system hours before the blaze.
My father died screaming. Burned alive because he witnessed an arms deal Vincent Valentino wanted buried.
I studied my mother's face in the funeral photo. The doctors said the cancer was genetic. I knew better. The Valentinos killed her too, just slower.
I put the phone away.
Sienna Valentino was beautiful. That was a fact, like her height or the color of her eyes. She had lived her entire privileged life on blood money, in a mansion paid for by my father's death and a thousand others like it.
I would make her fall in love with me, and then I would use that love to destroy everything her family had built.
It was justice.
By the time we reached Southwark, I had my strategy mapped out. First dinner. Somewhere I controlled the environment. Then carefully calibrated vulnerability, just enough to make her feel trusted. Then escalation, physical and emotional, until she was so entangled she couldn't distinguish her feelings from my fiction.
The fact that she was beautiful would make the performance easier. Nothing more complicated than that.
- Writer
