Chapter Two
VALENTINO
She's something.
I don't know what yet. That's the problem.
I stand at the head of the table with her résumé in my hand and run my eyes over it once more.
Her credentials are clean. Calloway & Voss for five years, where she rose so fast, you'd think she got them for free.
Her crisis response record is better than clean. It's exceptional.
The HarborTech breach alone would have made lesser professionals disappear into legal cover. She stayed visible. She stayed useful.
I look up.
She watches me with an expression I can’t quite pin down. Whatever it is, it isn’t nerves, I saw how she performed from the door. Nor is it arrogance. I know what that looks like.
"Small issues like what, Ms. De Luca?" I ask once more, not enthusiastic about repeating myself again.
Her chin lifts slightly. Whatever was happening behind her eyes gets locked down fast, and she clears her throat.
"You're scaling fast, Mr. Ferretti. But fast growth means you're going to make decisions that can affect transparency. In times like that, bad communication would be suicide.”
A beat of silence follows.
Marchetti, my head of operations, shifts almost imperceptibly in his seat.
"You identified this from publicly available material?" I ask.
"Your client testimonials, regulatory filings, and last two press releases," she replies briskly.
I set the résumé down. It lands with a soft slap.
The panel is watching me the way they always do when I enter a room late: trying to read whether they've done something wrong, whether their evaluation aligns with mine, whether I'm pleased.
I rarely tell them.
I glance back down at the résumé. At the name in the header.
Livia De Luca.
There it is. The thing that doesn't belong.
I step out while the panel wraps the formal portion. Marchetti follows, pulling the conference room door shut behind us, and I walk to the window at the end of the hall and look out at the city without seeing it.
"You knew," I say.
Marchetti clears his throat. "We flagged it in the screening stage."
"And?"
"Her credentials are legitimately strong. The team felt it would be worth your time to make that determination yourself rather than filter her out before you'd seen her work."
He's right. I would have said the same thing. It still irritates me.
Dante De Luca. Founder of De Luca Global Logistics.
A man who has spent the last three years positioning his company as a competitor in the high-net-worth client protection space. Our space.
He's been circling the Aurelius contract for months. He's well-funded, well-connected, and morally flexible in ways that make him effective and exhausting in equal measure.
Now, his daughter is currently sitting in my conference room with a coffee stain on her blouse and the most ruthlessly accurate competitive analysis of my firm that I have heard from anyone outside a board room.
"She's estranged from him," Marchetti says. "Our background check was thorough. No professional contact in three years, no financial ties we could verify, limited personal communication by all accounts."
"Accounts change."
"They do," he agrees. He doesn't argue further. He knows better.
I stand there for another moment.
Down on the street below, a taxi cuts sharply into traffic and someone on a bicycle swerves and keeps moving, unbothered. The city absorbs everything. That's the only thing I have ever found genuinely comforting about it.
I think about the Aurelius contract.
The Legacy Shield Contract, that's what they're calling it in the industry, though the Aurelius Family Office Consortium hasn't given it an official name.
It's a ten-year exclusive agreement. Comprehensive family-protection and crisis-management coverage for twelve of the most significant private family offices in the world.
Intelligence coordination, physical security architecture, legal crisis response, compliance, financial protection infrastructure. Everything, all of it, unified under one firm.
If we win it, Ferretti Global Risk becomes the leading family-protection company in the world. Not one of the leading.
The leading.
If we lose it, we remain very good. Respected. Profitable.
Very good has never interested me.
I turn away from the window.
"Tell Ms. Delaney to give her the NDA," I say. "I'll finish the conversation myself."
When I step back into the conference room, the panel has filed out.
Livia De Luca is still seated, turned slightly toward the window, her bag in her lap.
She isn't checking her phone or fidgeting. She’s watching the city with a worn, steady resolve that I catch for a split second before she notices me and quickly reins it in.
I take the seat across from her.
"The panel was impressed."
"I noticed," she says. Then, catching herself: "That's not arrogance. I just…I'm a compliance strategist. Reading a room is literally the job."
"I know."
"Right." She presses her lips together.
"I'm aware of who your father is,” I state plainly.
She goes very still.
"Then you're also aware that my father and I have no professional relationship." Her voice is even when she speaks. "No financial ties. Limited personal contact. I have not worked for or with De Luca Global in any capacity, and I have no intention of doing so."
"That wasn't a question."
She pauses and breathes out. "I know. I'm answering it anyway."
I look at her for a moment. She looks back without flinching, which most people do not manage.
Her dark hair is trying and failing to stay in its professional twist, a few strands clinging to the curve of her neck where her pulse beats visibly.
She is also, I notice with some irritation, doing the same thing she did when I checked her résumé earlier: staring at my hands.
“You’re either very confident or very desperate, Ms. De Luca,” I say finally. “You know your father is my competitor.”
Her chin lifts a fraction. “I’d call it prepared. You don’t hire people to flatter you, Mr. Ferretti. You hire them to protect what you’ve built. And right now, your compliance architecture has holes big enough for someone like my father to drive a truck through.”
The corner of my mouth twitches. Not quite a smile. “Bold.”
“Accurate,” she counters. Her gaze flicks to my hand again before snapping back to my face.
This is starting to bother me.
I stand and circle the table slowly, stopping beside her chair. I catch the faint scent of coconut lotion.
“Stand up,” I say.
She hesitates for only a beat, brows pinching together, but then rises.
She’s taller than I expect in those heels, though still forced to tilt her head to meet my eyes. The blouse clings where the coffee dried, outlining the soft swell of her breast.
I keep my gaze on her face, but the image is
burned in already.
“You’re shaking,” I observe quietly.
“Adrenaline,” she replies. “And these heels are trying to kill me.”
“Take them off.”
Her brows shoot up. “Excuse me?”
“We’re past the performance portion of this interview. Take them off so you can think clearly instead of balancing on stilts. Then tell me why I should trust you with the Aurelius contract when your last name alone could cost me everything if your father decides to use you as leverage.”
She stares at me for a long second, then kicks off the heels with more force than necessary.
Her eyes basically shoot daggers at me now. Barefoot, she looks smaller, vulnerable. Her red-painted toes curl against the cool marble floor.
“I left his world five years ago,” she says quietly.
“I know that.”
Her eyes snap to me. “I don’t owe him loyalty. I have a son to feed and a life I built without his money or his name. If you think I’d crawl back to him for anything short of the apocalypse, you haven’t done your homework as well as you think.”
I raise a brow at the fire, mentally filing another detail: a son.
I hold her gaze for a moment. Then: "Alright. Walk me through your plan for Ferretti Global Risk."
She wastes no time, doing so without using the words synergy or ecosystem or holistic approach, which tells me she actually knows what she's talking about rather than having read a whitepaper about it.
She identifies three specific structural vulnerabilities in our client communication chain, proposes a framework I haven't heard articulated that way before, and does it all in under four minutes without notes.
I ask three questions. She answers two precisely and tells me she doesn't have enough internal data to answer the third yet, which is a better answer than the fabricated confidence most candidates offer.
When she finishes, her eyes are bright with passion. Or desperation.
She needs this job. That much is clear.
My mind goes back to the Aurelius contract. About the evaluation period beginning in six weeks and the compliance review the Consortium's representatives will conduct.
And about Dominic Calder, their sharp-eyed crisis consultant, who will find every gap in our operation and document it with cheerful thoroughness.
It's risky. Having Dante's daughter in my firm.
But I need someone who knows what they're doing. And from the sounds of it…
“Fine. You're hired.”
Her eyes snap to mine in surprise. “Seriously?”
“Do I look unserious to you, Ms. De Luca?”
Her eyes water, but she blinks it back, forcing herself to stay in control. She clears her throat. “Okay.”
"You report directly to me. On everything."
"Directly to you," she echoes. I watch her throat work around a swallow, the delicate line of her neck drawing my attention for half a second longer than it should.
"Yes, Livia. Come straight to me for everything. You start Monday. HR will have the contract and full NDA packet ready by end of day.”
She bends to retrieve her heels and slides them back on.
And wordlessly, she leaves.
As the door closes behind her, my thoughts finally start to settle.
A part of me finds the fact that I gave a job this delicate to Dante's daughter profoundly illogical. But another part of me knows she's the one I'm looking for.
And it's for reasons beyond this contract I'm seeking.
I have a son, her tired voice keeps echoing in my head.
There's a version of this company that existed before it had a name. Before the offices and infrastructure.
Before two hundred and forty-three people would clock in every day to carry work that once belonged to me and, later on, to a handful of people trying to make themselves useful with their peculiar skillsets.
I think about this sometimes. Not often. But when the building is quiet and I'm the last one on the floor, I think about how it started with Vaughn.
Nobody who worked with Vaughn Mercer would call him easy. Least of all me, and I respect the hell out of that man.
He demanded more than most because he knew mediocrity was dangerous, and in our profession, danger had a body count.
He was also, and I understood this only later, after I'd built something of my own, quietly, methodically preparing me to leave.
I didn't see it at the time because I thought I was indispensable.
I was good at what I did: crisis logistics, threat assessment, the careful game of human chess where one wrong move could turn a small problem into a catastrophe.
That talent, for me, was a kind of contract, that since I was good with Vaughn, I was meant to remain there.
He disabused me of that notion over a dinner in Prague, three years after Riley.
You've outgrown the role, he said. You need to make your own name.
I told him he was being ridiculous. What's important is that we made a good team.
He looked at me for a long time and said, you're better than I could ever be.
I started Ferretti Global Risk eight months later.
We built it from a small operation with a handful of clients into something that could do what I always believed protection work should do: reach the people who needed it before catastrophe arrived, not after.
Good people should not have to be helpless. That's it. That's the whole philosophy.
The infrastructure, the strategy, the growth…all of it is just how that belief gets translated into action.
I was ten years old when my father was beaten bloody outside our house in Calabria.
He was a man who believed morality was enough to keep danger away, but he ended up on the ground with broken ribs and a battered face for refusing to do what he knew was wrong. The sound of his cries still filters into my dreams to this day.
He was reasonable, hardworking and honest.
None of it was sufficient.
That's why I built Ferretti Global Risk.
To make integrity sufficient.
And whether I like her father or not, I see that same integrity in Livia De Luca.