Bound To The Don (Collateral Hearts #1)

PROLOGUE

Three months before the wedding

Marco set the folder on the desk without a word, the way he'd learned to deliver bad news to a man who punished nothing so much as being made to wait for it.

Dante didn't open it immediately. He finished the call he was on — a shipment delayed at the port, a problem that would be solved within the hour by someone else's fear rather than his own effort — and only then drew the folder toward him across the desk, unhurried, the way he did everything that mattered.

Antonio Rossi's file. Three years of debt, compounding in the quiet, patient way debts did when a man kept believing the next deal would save him. Dante had read it before. He knew the numbers the way he knew the layout of his own house — without needing to look, without needing to think.

He was reaching to close it again when the photograph slid loose from the back page and turned face-up on the desk between his hands.

He went very still.

It was nothing, by any objective measure.

A young woman on a sidewalk outside her father's office building, caught mid-laugh at something beyond the frame, her head tipped back, a strand of dark hair escaping whatever careful style she'd started the morning with.

Not posed. Not aware of the camera at all.

Marco's man had taken it in passing, one more piece of due diligence on a family Dante was three signatures away from ruining.

Dante had looked at thousands of photographs in his life. Surveillance. Evidence. Men who needed watching, women who needed protecting, enemies who needed remembering. He had trained himself, a long time ago, not to feel anything in particular when he looked at a face.

He felt something now, looking at this one, and it unsettled him more than any threat he'd faced in fifteen years of this business.

"Her name," he said, not looking up.

"Elena." Marco, by the door, chose his next words with the particular care of a man who had served this family long enough to recognize when his employer had just stepped onto ground he didn't fully understand yet.

"The daughter. Twenty-four. No husband, no scandal, no debts of her own.

She teaches herself things, mostly. Reads a great deal.

Keeps to herself, according to the people who know her. "

"Is she aware of her father's arrangement with us?"

"No, Don Moretti. As far as we can tell, she knows nothing at all."

Dante turned the photograph slightly, angling it toward the lamp, studying the unguarded shape of her laughter the way another man might have studied a threat, searching for the detail that would explain why it had lodged itself so completely behind his ribs on first sight.

He thought of the plan already in motion — the quiet pressure building against Antonio Rossi's remaining assets, the timeline that would end, within the year, with the man losing everything he had left.

It was clean. It was fair, by the only definition of fairness this world allowed him.

It required nothing of the daughter at all.

He found, turning the photograph once more beneath the lamplight, that he no longer wanted it to require nothing of her.

"Pull together everything you can find on the daughter," he said quietly. "Discreetly. I want to know her before I decide anything else about her father."

Marco hesitated — a rare thing, and telling, from a man who had never once questioned an order in eleven years of service. "May I ask why, Don Moretti?"

Dante didn't answer for a long moment. Outside his study window, the city went on being exactly what it had always been — a place where men like him collected what was owed and felt nothing extra about the collecting.

He looked down at a stranger's laugh, caught by accident on a sidewalk she hadn't known was being watched, and felt the first crack form in a wall he had spent his whole adult life building without once noticing the cost of its construction.

"Because I think," he said finally, "I am about to make a very foolish decision. And I would like to know everything about the woman responsible before I make it."

He did not put the photograph back in the folder. He kept it out, face-up on the desk, long after Marco had gone, and did not examine too closely why he found himself unwilling to look away from it.

Three months later, he would walk into Antonio Rossi's study and change the terms of the debt entirely.

He would tell himself, for a long time afterward, that it had been a calculated decision.

It had not been calculated at all.