Chapter 2
732 Words
A black Maybach was parked in the underground garage.
Adriano Castellano stepped out, removed his sunglasses, and lifted a hand toward me.
He wore a custom dark gray suit.
At thirty-two, he somehow carried both the ease of a young man and the composure of someone much older.
And yet, in the entire Castellano family, they couldn't find one suitable woman for an arranged marriage.
So they had to ask me, his employee, to pretend to be his fiancée and deal with his famously difficult godfather.
I hesitated at first.
But Adriano's offer was simple.
Ten times my current salary.
Plus an apartment in Manhattan.
My heart was made of iron in every way except one.
Money.
I had been too poor as a child.
One pair of jeans had to last me through an entire winter.
When I got my period, I used the cheapest supermarket toilet paper as a pad and prayed it wouldn't leak.
The only time I got to eat a piece of steak was on holidays, and even then it was usually burnt black.
The sentence my mother said most often was,
"We're poor, Sloane. Too poor. There's nothing we can do."
My father died because we were poor.
The day he had a heart attack, we had to knock on the neighbor's door just to borrow money for an ambulance.
It was terrifying.
So my greatest dream in life was simple.
To have a lot of money.
A ridiculous amount of money.
That was why, at twenty-three, when I held the Castellano Group offer letter in my hands, they wouldn't stop shaking.
In three years, I went from a bottom-level analyst to the person beside Adriano who could be trusted with anything.
I calculated routes for him.
Audited books.
Watched rival families.
I understood exactly what a surname meant in this city.
The name Castellano could make an entire table of men stand up at once on the other end of a phone call.
And Sloane Carter?
Sloane Carter was nothing.
No family.
No background.
Just a woman who had clawed her way up inch by inch.
In a world where last names determined life and death, I didn't even qualify as someone worth destroying.
Because I didn't have a name worth remembering.
But precisely because I had nothing, I knew better than anyone what I wanted.
"Boss."
I hurried over and put on my standard employee smile.
Adriano's gaze landed on the side of my neck.
I had forgotten to cover the hickey.
Awkwardly, I pulled my hair forward, trying to hide it.
"A gift."
He handed me a long, narrow box.
Inside was a silk scarf.
Pale lavender.
A perfect match for the white dress I was wearing.
I wrapped it twice around my neck.
No matter how I adjusted it, it still looked strange.
When Lucian stepped out of the elevator across from us, Adriano was leaning down to fix the scarf for me.
I pretended not to see Lucian.
He didn't greet me either.
But his steps paused for a second.
"That's the man you once mentioned?"
Adriano asked quietly.
"The one you could never quite let go of?"
I used to keep a photo of Lucian on my desk.
He had been my phone lock screen too.
My entire youth had once revolved around Lucian Ferraro.
"Ancient history," I said.
I got into the passenger seat.
Adriano closed the door for me, gentlemanly enough to make it feel as if he were protecting something fragile.
The window was slightly lowered.
New York in April had a gentle wind.
I had once loved Lucian Ferraro so deeply.
So completely.
In a way, the turning point of my life began the day I met him.
When he was young, his health was poor.
He was born with a lung condition.
The Ferraro family sent him to a small seaside town to recover.
The town was beautiful.
And dirt poor.
Back then, I was the unwanted wild child in town.
After my father died, my mother remarried.
My stepfather thought I was baggage and dumped me on my grandmother, sending a little money each month.
I didn't like to talk.
Barely knew how to interact with people.
Didn't understand much of anything.
I survived purely on instinct.
Until that summer.
At the end of the wooden pier, I saw him for the first time.
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