Stealing Cinder (Mafia Daddies #4)

Chapter 1

CINDER

Cold sheets of grief wrap around me. Dirt from my father's grave is still under my nails and these people are already counting his money.

I claw back my emotions and shove them back into the black box before they can be used against me.

The lawyer's mouth is moving, but I stopped listening ten minutes ago. I don’t need to listen to him talk about my father's life like it's a filing cabinet. Assets. Holdings. Bequests.

I press my nails into my palms under the table and focus on the sting. My body is a raw nerve today, every sense dialed so high the room vibrates with detail I can't shut out. Edgar's cigar smoke clings to everything in the room. The curtains, my mother’s upholstery and me.

After today I’ll need to burn this dress.

Beneath the stench, Francesca's perfume forces its way in. I can’t remember the name, but the floral sweetness churns my stomach.

I swear she walks around the rooms in my father’s mansion spraying like a dog marking its territory.

The combination of perfume and smoke has me taking shallow breathes, and I swallow hard against the bile crawling up the back of my throat.

The hardwood beneath my heels creaks as I shift my weight, earning me the stink eye from my stepmother.

The botoxed skin at the edge of her eyes tries to crinkle with irritation, but she just looks like a frozen clown with her pinned up hair and red lips.

But the evil in her dark eyes is real. She’s spent a decade and a half learning how to be cruel and teaching it to her two daughters who are just as unfortunate in the looks department.

I turn my attention away before I march over to the head of the table and toss the witch out of my father’s seat.

My father built his real estate empire from his office across the hall as well as this mansion. Anyone would be envious of the three-story brownstone with its limestone accents, arched windows, and climbing ivy.

We sit in the dining room where my mother used to hold Thanksgiving dinners with twenty chairs and an open-door policy. My father’s laugh always bounced off these walls. The smell of roasted turkey and my mother's pecan pie hung in the air for days.

Then everything changed. Mom died and so did the light in this place.

Now a crystal chandelier two sizes too large hangs over the table, throwing hard, fractured light across walls where family portraits once hung.

Gold-framed mirrors reflect strangers back at me.

We buried my father this morning and Edgar has already replaced the photographs.

The luggage in the foyer says he’s now calling my father’s home his.

What a best friend. Who needs enemies, right?

The way he’s standing behind my stepmother with his hand on her shoulder says he’s moving into my father’s bed, too.

I wonder if he knew about the affair.

Does it matter? It should, damn it. This is the second time I’ve lost everything in my life and no one is doing a damn thing about the crime happening right under their noses.

Everything is just…gone. And my fucking stepmother can’t stop grinning.

My heart flexes and contracts with trashed nerves, clawing fear and rage.

The ache of that truth sits low in my belly, a physical weight pressing so heavy it’s hard to breathe.

I can still smell the fresh earth and the too-sweet lilies piled beside dad’s casket.

The cold wind bit through my black dress as they lowered him into the ground.

The brass handles on his coffin glinted in weak spring sunlight, and all I could do was stare at them because looking at the faces around me would have broken me apart.

And now, hours later, I’m still frozen inside.

Francesca sits at the head of the table in my father's chair. Her posture is immaculate, her black dress designed to accentuate all her ample curves. Curves Edgar can’t keep his eyes off of or the lawyer.

Fucking gross.

My stepmother’s grief is a costume she put on with her makeup this morning and he’ll wipe it off tonight, never to let it touch her expression much less her heart again.

Edgar moves his hand to wrap around hers. Oh, they have their skit well rehearsed, I’ll give them that. He strokes his thumb over her knuckles, leans in to whisper. She dabs at dry eyes with a monogrammed handkerchief.

It’s all theater. Every second of this is a play for the lawyer.

Fate is an ugly bitch when she takes the life of the wrong people. My mother and father were good. They helped others and lived a life where everyone was welcome.

But they were taken and all I’m left with is an evil stepmother and her two daughters who would rather siphon money off their mother than actually work.

Ugh. God, listen to me. I’m turning as bitter and poisonous as the people I loathe. My grief is a blade today, that’s for damn sure. It is cutting through every pretense in this room with surgical precision, and what it reveals underneath makes my blood run cold.

These two killed my father. I can't prove it yet. But my stomach turns every time Edgar's fingers brush Francesca's knuckles, and my gut has never lied to me.

I tried to warn my father years ago, when Francesca first moved into this house with her two daughters and their matched set of venomous smiles. I told him they were nothing but gold diggers. I said it to his face and he blinked at me like I'd spoken a foreign language.

"A girl needs a woman's influence in her life," he liked to say, leaning back in his study chair with a crossword balanced on his knee. He’d look at me with warm eyes that creased at the corners with a love so steady it made me feel invincible.

"I have books," I told him.

He didn't like that answer. He shook his head with that gentle, stubborn smile of his and went back to his crossword. Subject closed. Not because he was cruel. No, my father was kind and I fear that is what got him killed.

My mother, Violet, died when I was young.

Hit-and-run. They never caught who did it.

She was kind, fierce and mine, and the world took her from me before I had the chance to learn all she had to teach me.

What I have left are fragments of memory.

The scent of her shampoo. The sound of her humming in the kitchen.

The way my father's eyes went soft when they would share and look across the room.

That kind of love is rare.

After she died, Francesca swooped in. My mother's "best friend." A title that gave her full access to a grieving widower with deep pockets and an even bigger heart. She brought casseroles and kind words and two little girls who called my father "Uncle Vinny" and clung to his legs.

He ate it up. He needed to be needed, and Francesca served herself on a platter of manufactured necessity.

Edgar came next. My father's longtime "friend" who stuck around for easy access to the bank accounts and the business deals and the name that opened doors across Chicago. My father believed friends were rare and precious. He refused to see the predators eating at his table and sleeping in his bed.

Twelve years. Twelve years of Francesca and her two daughters circling, waiting, performing love for an audience of one. And now that audience is dead.

"Ms. Ashford."

My gaze snaps to the lawyer. He adjusts his glasses, clears his throat, shuffles papers without looking at me.

"As outlined in the final testament, the entirety of the Ashford estate, including all real property holdings, financial assets, business interests, and personal effects, is to be distributed in equal thirds to Mrs. Francesca Ashford, Ms. Bianca Ashford, and Ms. Gianna Ashford."

Equal thirds. Meaning they take everything my father spent his entire adulthood building.

My jaw locks. Every muscle in my face goes rigid, and I hold the expression blank by force of will alone.

Across the table, Gianna shifts in her chair, a smirk tugging at the corner of her lips.

Bianca crosses her legs and inspects her manicure with bored satisfaction.

But behind that aloof expression I know she’s counting all the ways she’s going to spend my father’s billions.

Francesca produces a single tear. It slides down her cheek. Edgar squeezes her hand and shakes his head with rehearsed solemnity.

The burn behind my eyes is savage, and I crush it before it can become tears. I will not cry in front of these people. I will bleed from the mouth before I give them a single drop of weakness to feed on.

This will is a forgery. My father would never have cut me out.

Not the man who left handwritten notes in my school lunches until I was sixteen.

Not the man who drove forty-five minutes across Chicago in a snowstorm because I called him crying when a bad date left me stranded.

My father loved me with every breath in his body, and the document in that lawyer's hands is a lie.

But I sit perfectly still, jaw locked, spine straight, and give the four vultures sitting across from me absolutely nothing to feast on.

I don't care about the money. I never have.

My father didn't raise me to worship wealth.

He raised me to value people, loyalty, love that builds a home out of open doors and honest conversations.

He walked every street in this city, shook every hand.

The doormen, the waitresses, the men and women in every corner of Chicago who knew his name and smiled when they said it.

People loved him. Respected him. A good man who believed the world rewarded goodness.

But that is where he was wrong.

A random mugging, the police and detectives called it.

He was simply on the wrong side of town and at the wrong time.

He took a bullet in his heart, and yet his wallet was still in his pocket.

His wedding ring was still on his finger when they found him.

Nothing was taken except his life. Someone murdered him in a neighborhood he'd walked a thousand times and not a single witness came forward.