HER RULES HIS EMPIRE

CHAPTER ONE: MEN IN BLACK

Looking down at the bill before her, Isabella shuddered and panicked immediately. The numbers seemed to blur, adding and multiplying the longer she stared at them, as though they despised her. She fumbled through her bag, searching desperately for her card, her chequebook, something or anything that might offer a reasonable explanation for how she — the heiress of the Romano family — was now struggling to pay a hospital bill. Just months ago, such a sum would have meant nothing to her. Now it felt like a high summit she was being forced to climb.

It was even harder to look the nurses in the eye as she muttered gibberish, half-formed apologies spitting out of her mouth, before she finally gave up and rushed toward the elevator, her heels clicking too loudly against the tiled floor. She pressed and played with the button several times before it decided to answer her, as though that alone would make the doors open faster, and eventually, when they did, she slipped inside, inwardly berating herself for the shame she felt in the ward as she pressed herself against the cool metal wall. Once outside, in the open air of the Milani hospital courtyard, she breathed a long sigh of relief, though her hands were shaking greatly and her breathing was heavy.

"So much for a hospital visit", she thought out loud.

As she wandered through Milani Hospital's grand entrance, she passed familiar faces — old family friends, society acquaintances, even enemies and people who had known her since she was her father's favourite only daughter playing in her father's garden. They greeted her with warm smiles, addressing her as "the young Romano heiress" as they always had, vaguely aware of how shallow that title now felt and how little or nothing was attached to it. If only the name could pay her bills, she could have summoned the entire Rome to say it.

To hide her shame, she offered polite, short responses and kept walking, quietly ordering a taxi on her phone as she stepped out onto the streets of Corso Vittorio Emanuele, where the glowing and beautiful evening light coupled with the nice city view did nothing to lift the heaviness in her chest. Back in Brianza, the wealthy hill district just north of Milan, the taxi pulled up in front of the Romano family estate. This same house that had once represented permanence and pride and dignity now felt more like a fragile egg about to c***k and unveil its fragility to the whole universe. As she entered, the silence of the halls did nothing but make her heart more heavy and presumptuous of the danger that eventually lies ahead. She collapsed into the chair in the living room, letting her bag slip from her shoulder to the floor, and sat there for a long moment, doing nothing but breathing.

Then, after a thought, she rose and walked briskly into her father's room, her fingers already reaching for the drawers of his old mahogany desk. The beautiful desk he once worked at and the chair he sat on while he carried her in his lap. She rummaged through papers, letters, and folders, searching for anything that might explain what was happening to their family. "How could an empire built over three generations collapse in the blink of an eye?" she whispered to herself, her voice cracking with a mixture of anger and disbelief and every emotion she had fought hard to keep back. Every document she found only raised more questions: unclear and vague references to loans, cancelled contracts, unfamiliar signatures and names. More drawers led to more names, but one drew her attention, the one that had repeated itself countless times: "Moretti". Reluctantly, she signed and sat on the cold marble tiles.

It was in the middle of this search that her phone rang. The hospital was calling again, and this time, the voice on the other end was more tense than usual. Her father's condition was getting worse. And then, almost as an afterthought, the nurse added that he had asked to speak with her directly. The nurse, of course trying to act friendly and hinted at the presence of something sinister. Isabella's hands stilled over the drawer. For a moment, the papers she held seemed to lose all importance. She grabbed her coat and rushed toward the front door, her heart pounding with a fear she hadn't let herself feel until now.

Outside, a black-tinted car was already waiting for her, its engine humming quietly in the driveway. She hesitated only briefly before climbing in, wondering, not for the first time that day, what all of this could be about. As she got into the car, a gloomy presence overwhelmed her. She studied the driver's face in the rearview mirror, this face that seemed too familiar to be mistaken, though she couldn't place exactly where she had seen it before. Then it came to her: she had seen this same car, and this same face, lingering near the hospital entrance on more than one occasion over the past weeks.

"Who sent you and why do you keep showing up?" she asked, trying to keep the edge of panic out of her voice. Then she raised her voice and asked, this time panicky and on the verge of tears, What have you done with my father?" But the driver seemed far more focused on the road ahead than on his passenger. His eyes flicked briefly to the mirror, then back to the street. "Miss Romano, your father requested that I take you to see him," was all he offered.

She pressed further, asking question after question, but all her efforts proved abortive. He offered nothing more, his jaw set, his silence unshakable. Isabella slumped back into her seat, her mind spinning.

Her thoughts drifted back to the unpaid bill sitting crumpled in her bag, to the family house that was quietly, secretly on the verge of being mortgaged by the bank, to her siblings resting in the family plot at Cimitero Monumentale, and to the late-night, hushed meetings her father had been holding with men dressed in black, always at the hospital, always when he thought no one was watching. Piece by piece, the fragments of the past weeks assembled themselves into something far larger and more frightening than she had allowed herself to admit.

It was then, staring blankly out the tinted window as the city blurred past her, that she realised the things happening around her were far more than she could handle alone.

When Isabella finally arrived back at the hospital, she found it more crowded than usual. Men in black suits stood at intervals along the corridors, their presence stiff and deliberate, like sentries rather than visitors. The hallway leading to her father's private ward, usually quiet and sparsely populated, now seemed to hum with a tension she had never witnessed there before.She approached the door with a strange sense of dread pooling in her stomach. Her fingers wrapped around the doorknob, and she held her breath for a moment before pushing it open. Bright sunlight spilt out from the room, momentarily blinding her as she stepped inside.