1. One
ONE
HARLOWE
Ten years earlier . . .
It started with silence. Not the good kind, but the kind that made me feel safe—tucked away in velvet halls and guarded rooms. No, this silence felt wrong.
Too quiet. Like the world had stopped breathing just before the scream.
When it happened, I was on the second floor of my family’s estate, reading—or pretending to. The book lay open across my lap, but I’d been staring at the window for an hour, watching the cold sky drip rain down the glass like blood down marble.
Luca was supposed to be home hours ago. He always texted, always called. He’d storm into my room, still smelling like gunpowder and cologne, teasing me, messing up my hair, and calling me “princess” in that annoyingly perfect older brother voice I’d never admit I loved.
But tonight?
Nothing.
Then came the knock—three slow, heavy raps against the front door that echoed through the walls. I heard my father answer, followed by the shuffling footsteps before the shift. The low, unspoken something’s wrong that only a Virelli could sense before a tragedy arrived.
And then . . . my mother’s scream.
It ripped through the house like a bullet through stained glass.
I didn’t think, I just ran—down the stairs, around the corner, my bare feet barely touching the floor.
I found my parents in the foyer. My father stood still as a statue, jaw clenched, and his eyes black.
My mother collapsed on the ground, sobbing into the polished floor.
And in the doorway, stood three of our men with blood on their vests.
At their feet, was something wrapped in a tarp, barbed wire holding it closed.
I saw a crucifix first, made of fencing nails hammered through two pale, lifeless hands.
Luca’s hands. I could tell because of his signet ring, identical to my father’s, but the stone was green instead of red.
The tarp was carelessly wrapped around him, one of his shoes hung off his foot, soaked in his blood, and the back of his head was caved in.
On top of the body, there was a folded note.
Payment for pride.
– Romanov
That was the moment everything inside me shattered.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry. I didn’t collapse on the ground like my mother.
I stared at his lifeless brown eyes, now milky gray, because he was already gone.
He’d left me. I stared long enough to memorize every nail in his wrists, long enough to etch the blood pattern into my skull, and long enough to feel my innocence slide off my bones like silk.
I looked at my father. “Do something,” I whispered.
But Giovanni Virelli didn’t move.
“Why aren’t you doing something?” I screamed.
Then, he did something I’ll never forgive. He turned and walked away from his only son’s mutilated body, away from my mother, and away from me.
My mother wailed and clawed at the slick hem of his expensive suit pants, begging in Italian prayers I understood by the way they shook her throat. And Giovanni Virelli—Capo, Patriarch, coward—left us on the floor with my brother, a son he raised and ruined.
And I watched the last person in this world who was supposed to protect us disappear down the marble hallway and close the door to his study behind him.
I sat beside Luca and tried to yank the barbed wire from his blue tarp coffin, slicing open my palms. Frank, one of my father’s most loyal bodyguards, wrapped his arm around my trembling shoulders.
I’d known him since I was five years old.
Frank used to sneak me lemon drops when I hovered outside my father’s office during business meetings.
Now, he tilted his head to block my view, but I forced myself to look.
And look again, and again, the same way I’d memorized Latin declensions—by making it hurt.
I wouldn’t leave him.
Not yet. Not until somebody did something.
“He’s cold,” I said, like it was profound, or would change anything.
Frank’s voice was sandpaper. “He was gone when we found him, Principessa.”*
“He’s my brother.” My voice cracked. “Your friend.”
He jerked; his jaw ticked. “Yes, Miss.”
“We have to go after them. We have to—”
Frank shook his head, and even his six-foot-four, tattooed like a medieval tapestry frame, looked smaller that night.
And I understood.
We wouldn’t. My father wouldn’t let us.
Eventually, they took my brother away, and my mother’s cries faded to a whimper, then to a silence she never recovered from.
And I learned something that night, something that the Virellis didn’t teach their daughter but should have.
When the men who are supposed to protect you won’t . . . you protect yourself.
* Princess