THE DON'S SECRET HEIR

Chapter One: What the Rain Keeps

"What did you do to her?"

The words had left my mouth before I had the chance to rephrase it. My voice came out smaller than I intended, and I hated the feeling. I had rehearsed stronger words on the drive over. Something that matched the cold and the rain and the two days of grief I had been carrying like stones weighing in my chest. What came out instead was barely above a whisper, and it dissolved almost immediately into the sound of rain against the terrace glass.

He did not turn.

He did not move at all.

He just stood there at the window with his back to me watching the river lay black beneath the night sky running below us and the whiskey bottle loose in one hand, His shadow stretched across the floor like a crack in the darkness cast by the single amber lamp burning in the corner.

I waited.

Nothing.

"Lucas.”

I whispered, still nothing. Not even the small shift of a man acknowledging that he had heard his name.

I pressed my wet coat against my sides and stepped further into the room. My shoes were soaked to my bones. My dress was clinging to every part of me and the cold had settled deep into my skin, but I had driven across Seville in the dark and in the rain and I was not leaving without an explanation.

“Lucas can you hear me” I said, shivering from the cold

I moved closer, enough to see the side of his face properly. I should be afraid, there were different kinds of stories being whispered in the street about him, but I wasn’t scared, I need to hear it from him.

He had dark circles, he clenched his jaw so tight it looked painful. Five days of grief carved into features that women in this city described in one breath and feared in the next.

He had not slept. By the look of it, not since she died.

The whiskey bottle was nearly half empty.

Good, I thought, and then felt immediately ashamed of the thought. But I meant it. The remorse I could see in every rigid line of him was something I had driven through the rain to find. The world was already creating stories about this man and I needed to see his face and know with my own eyes whether any of it was true.

"I am not leaving until you talk to me," I said again, growing impatient by the silence that stretched, I had not planned to come here.

That morning I had stood in the black dress my mother brought to the hotel room and stared at myself in the bathroom mirror and told myself I was going to get through the day.

I was going to stand at Camilla's graveside. I was going to hold myself together. I was going to say goodbye to the best friend I had loved since I was fifteen years old and I was going to do it without falling apart because falling apart was a thing I could do later, privately, when no one was there to see it.

I had met Camilla Ferrara in a corridor on the first day of secondary school in London, outside the year ten common room, when three girls from the kind of group that existed in every school specifically to make other people feel small had surrounded me and were making mockery, and scornful observations about my shoes. Camilla had stood between us and glared back at them. She had not raised her voice. She had not made a scene. Then she simply looked at me, direct and completely unimpressed by everything happening around us, and said come on, I know a quiet place we can go to play.

That was it. That was the whole beginning of fifteen years of friendship.

She had always been impossible to describe to people who had never met her. She wasn’t just beautiful, she carried a kind of light that made every room shine brighter the moment she stepped inside. She had a way of making people feel seen, of making them believe they could be more than they were.

But beneath all that light was a softness she wore like an unguarded skin. She loved too deeply, trusted too easily, and carried other people’s pain as though it belonged to her. It was the kind of tenderness that made her extraordinary, and the kind that made her easy to break.

She had been dead for two days.

She was just twenty seven years old.

And the story the city of Seville was already gossiping on, whispered at gravesides and in church chapel and over untouched food at reception tables, was not kind to the man who had loved her.

I had stood at the graveside in the grey Seville this morning and kept my eyes dry through something that was not strength but was the closest I could get to it. When the service ended I turned to find Lucas DiGiallorenzo and he was nowhere to be found.

He was not at the burial ground and also not in any of the cars that gathered for the reception. Not at the Ferrara family home where Camilla's mother sat very still in the conservatory with her hands folded like she was still in church.

The murmuring had started immediately. I heard it in the way people leaned toward each other when they thought no one was watching. I heard it in the silences that opened up when his name came close to being said.

I had said nothing. I had sat through an hour of the reception holding a cup of tea I did not drink, watching his family move through the rooms with the particular controlled urgency of people searching for someone without wanting to appear to be searching. Marco, Lucas' right hand man, was sweeping every space he entered with eyes that missed nothing.

His aunt Rosa with her phone in her hand and her lips pressed together. His brother Dante sitting at the far end of the room staring at the floor like it had said something to offend him, His family came to show their respect for a woman who almost became family. I know them because Camilla would show pictures and tell her versions of their characters.

But I had not planned to find him.

And as I stood up to sit besides Camilla’s mother, the thought strucked me

I’ll make him pay if he did caused her death.