Brenda’s POV
(Flashback – 12 years ago)
I was twenty-two years old and drowning.
The restaurant in Palermo was a tourist trap: overpriced pasta, waitresses in tight black dresses, and men who tipped with wandering hands.
I worked the late shift six nights a week, smiling through gritted teeth while my feet bled in cheap heels and my daughter slept at my mother’s apartment across town.
That was the night a man named Rico walked in. The most dreadful and dangerous I'd ever known. No, he didn’t look dangerous, nor did he look like someone who could snap a person’s neck backwards in five seconds.
Instead, he looked like money — quiet money. More like a humble billionaire with his dark suit, no tie, silver at the temples, and his eyes like the colour of wet slate.
He sat alone at the VI
