Prologue #2
A different movement on her periphery made her eyes dart to the side. One of the black-clad ants had unclustered from the group and was moving towards her at a rapid speed. She was already backtracking when he yelled out. “Get the fuck out of here, old hag. No fucking beggars here.”
She flipped around and walked out hurriedly.
So maybe she’d picked the wrong day, but she wasn’t wasting it.
If she couldn’t get to the main house, she’d wait for the spawn she’d birthed.
When she’d first gotten her address from her source, who had been keeping an eye out for her, she hadn’t thought of confronting her.
She’d wanted to go to the one with the deepest wallet.
But suddenly she was worried that the wealth might already be split, now that the don was no more.
Maybe the new don had all of it. Or maybe some of it was handed over to the bastard child.
She wasn’t wasting time, that was for sure.
Beggars couldn’t be choosers. It was better than nothing, anyway.
And maybe she could talk some sense into her bastard child.
Tell her the secret of the world because clearly the Di Matteo widow hadn’t.
The size of a man’s dick didn’t matter. How deep his wallet was, did.
Her disappointment grew as she left the grand house behind.
The closer she came to her destination, the tinier and shabbier the houses became.
An hour later, she was in a narrow, cobbled lane with a row of houses on either side and barely enough space for a small car to pass in between.
The front door was freshly painted, but in her eyes, it might as well have been falling apart on its hinges.
She’d sacrificed her body, her youth, her future to birth the bastard, and this was where she lived?
In a fucking nobody’s street? It was barely three times the size of her own house.
She wanted to rewind three decades and have a do-over because this was a crude fucking joke.
Peeping through the window only emphasised it.
A shoddy, dark room filled with dull furniture that had seen better days.
Nothing extraordinary. Nothing that reeked of the don’s money.
If the bastard child didn’t have anything of value to give her, she was killing her herself.
A wave of frustration rushed over her. It pushed her down to her ass on the warm front step.
The hours crawled by, giving her time to stew in her anger, yapping to herself, scaring off anyone who dared to pass by in the narrow street.
“What?” she sneered at the two girls who walked by. She grabbed a loose stone and threw it at their departing backs. It hit the spine of one of the girls, and they shrieked before running faster. “Don’t let a man fuck you before you get paid for it,” she yelled after them.
At first, she had only been disappointed.
That’s what she had thought. But it had twisted into resentment and then inflamed into open rage.
She wasn’t moving from there until her bastard child came home.
Fucking the bodyguard? While she could have been the bride at that party?
Then she could have walked in and made her claim as the mother of the bride.
Everyone would have put her in her right place.
Instead, she had to sit on this filthy doorstep and wait in the meager street in the wrong part of town for her highness to turn up at her next-to-nothing, stingy house.
Assunta thought no one would blame her for soiling the front step with her piss.
If her highness wanted her to act nice, she should have proven herself.
Packed up a nice bank account for her true mamma.
Assunta had only one intention in her mind.
She was fucking getting something for the effort she had gone through.
Fucking the don, losing her beauty, which she’d never recovered.
She’d been ruined for another man. No one wanted her anymore.
That man in the garden hadn’t even thought the groom could be fucking her.
She was done with everything. It was time the bastard child acted like what she was meant to be. Her fucking meal ticket.
The sun went down, and the moon swelled. Sometime after, the church bells donged eight times. What was she fucking partying for? Her sister marrying some important man?
She was sick of waiting. It should have felt like nothing compared to all the years she’d wasted on the Di Matteo famiglia.
Yet she felt every minute grating away. Every minute that she could be living.
Having a party of her own. It was her time to reap the benefits.
The church bells donged again. Nine times.
She’d never seen her spawn. It hadn’t interested her enough to seek her out, but when she saw the woman who turned the corner, walking with her head down and red heels in her hand, she didn’t need to.
It was déjà vu, showing how she had been when she was young and her body untainted by carrying a wretched child.
Her spawn was the spitting image of her.
Long black hair flowing down her back, skin as white as porcelain, big breasts, and a tiny waist. Except this one wore a rich dress in a rich colour, and she was about to make her rich.
She didn’t budge from where she sat. Fixated on the one thing that had ruined her entire life. With her shoulders slumped, she looked miserable. Good.
She was almost on her before she noticed Assunta.
Then she stopped. Her eyes climbed up wearily from the cobblestones, up her stained front steps to the woman blocking her front door, and every muscle in her body froze.
Assunta thought it was almost like watching a beautiful sculpture crack and fall apart right before her.
Horror and doubt tormented her eyes before they finally gave up and sank into a deep, black despair.
Carlo Di Matteo’s wife may not have told her children, but she’d definitely told her. Because her eyes spoke the truth she’d known all along. She knew she was the dirty secret in the Di Matteo famiglia.