Chapter 3 - The Alliance of Glass and SteelHigh above the city in a glass-walled penthouse overlooking Manhattan, Don Vittorio Romano paced across the imported Turkish rug, listening to his daughter’s frantic phone call.
“He defended the maid, Papa!” Isabella hissed through the receiver, her voice trembling with humiliation. “He knelt on the floor in front of her bastard child! He told me to go upstairs like I was a disobedient servant in my own future home!”
Vittorio Romano stopped pacing. His expression turned ice-cold. As the head of the powerful Romano syndicate, Vittorio had engineered the engagement between Isabella and Alessandro to merge the city’s construction cartels with Moretti’s shipping empire. A maid and an illegitimate child were variables that could ruin everything.
“Calm yourself, Isabella,” Vittorio commanded smoothly. “Alessandro is a pragmatist. He built his kingdom on contracts and leverage. If he is distracted by a domestic nuisance, we simply remove the nuisance. Where is the child now?”
“Locked away in the east wing with her mother,” Isabella replied bitterly. “Alessandro ordered guards on the door. He’s treating them like royalty.”
“Let him,” Vittorio smiled, a thin, cruel expression that didn’t reach his eyes. “A king who surrounds himself with weaknesses is easily overthrown. Find out what documents or history connect that maid to Alessandro before he legalizes the bloodline. If the boy cannot secure the merger through marriage, we will secure it through blood.”
Back at the estate, Alessandro sat at his mahogany desk, staring at a DNA comparison file that had materialized on his screen within forty-five minutes of his order. The match was 99.99%. Lily was his daughter. The realization flooded him not with panic, but with a fierce, terrifying protectiveness that he hadn’t felt since the night his mother died. He picked up his desk phone and dialed his most trusted caporegime.
“Vince,” Alessandro said softly.
“Boss?”
“Double the detail around the east wing. Nobody enters without my direct fingerprint authorization. And Vince?”
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“Yes, boss?”
“If anyone—anyone at all—looks at Rosa or Lily with anything less than absolute respect, put them in the river.”
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