4. Dominic
— ? —
Dominic
Ten Years Ago
“He’s offering his daughter,” Stefan said, dropping into the chair across from my desk. “Says she’s all he has left.”
“How much does he owe?”
“Enough that a daughter won’t cover it.”
I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my jaw. The desk was still my father’s, I had not changed it yet. I wanted to remember. Wanted to feel the weight of everything he had lost and everything I had taken every time I sat behind it.
“Then why is he offering her?” I asked.
“Because he’s out of options.” Stefan stretched his legs out, tired.
He had been with me since before I took the seat, one of the few men I trusted completely.
“Aldo Serra is a gambler. Always has been. Ran through his wife’s money years ago, and when that was gone, he started borrowing.
From us. From others. The daughter’s been keeping the family afloat, apparently.
Smart girl. Good with numbers. But she can’t outrun her father’s debts forever. ”
“And now he wants to hand her over like a payment.”
“He wants to hand her over so he doesn’t end up in the harbor.” Stefan shrugged. “Can’t blame him. Survival instinct’s a powerful thing.”
I considered it. A daughter. A bargaining chip. Leverage to be held and eventually spent, the way men like us had been spending women for generations. It was ugly business, but it was business.
“Bring her in,” I said. “Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”
Stefan pushed himself out of the chair and headed for the door. He paused with his hand on the handle.
“She’s not what you’re expecting,” he said. “Fair warning.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’ve been doing this for twenty years, and I’ve never seen anyone walk into this house the way she did.” He shook his head slowly.
“Interesting.”
“That’s one word for it.”
He left. I waited.
I expected what I always expected when a desperate man offered up his daughter. A frightened girl. Crying, pleading, bargaining with whatever she had. Some of them tried to offer themselves before I even asked, hoping that compliance would buy them mercy.
It never did. Mercy was not something I traded in.
The door opened.
Two of my men walked in first, flanking the space where the girl should have been. But she was not between them.
She was ahead of them.
She walked into my study like she had been invited, her chin up and her shoulders back, her dark eyes moving over the room. Not the eyes of someone deciding how to survive. The eyes of someone deciding how to take the whole place apart.
She stopped in the middle of the room and looked at me.
“I expected someone taller,” she said.
Behind her, a man in a cheap suit made a strangled sound. That would be the father. Aldo Serra. Sweating through his collar and watching his daughter insult the most dangerous man on the coast.
One of my men stepped forward, his hand moving toward his belt. I lifted a single finger without looking at him.
He stopped.
The room went quiet. I studied this girl, this woman, who had just walked into my house and insulted me to my face. She was twenty-one, maybe. Dark hair, dark eyes, curves that her plain dress could not hide. Beautiful in a way that usually made women careless.
She did not look careless. She looked like she was counting exits.
“Your father owes me a great deal,” I said.
She did not blink. “I know exactly what a man like you does with a girl who gets handed over like a payment. I’ve heard the stories. I know what happens in houses like this, in rooms like this, to women who get traded like currency.”
“Do you?”
“It’s not happening.” Her voice was steady. “Not to him, and not to me.”
“No?”
“The first man who tries will regret the hand he uses.”
The silence stretched between us. My men were tense, waiting. Any other night, from any other mouth, they would already be moving. Dragging her out. Teaching her what happened to people who spoke to me that way.
But I did not give the signal.
I looked at this furious, unafraid, wildly outmatched woman who had walked into my house and told me no to my face, and I felt something shift in my chest. Something I had not felt in months.
Curiosity.
“Sit down,” I said.
“I’ll stand.”
“I wasn’t asking.”
“Neither was I.”
My men shifted uncomfortably. Aldo Serra looked like he was about to faint.
I should have been angry. I should have felt the insult of it, this girl challenging me in my own house, in front of my own men.
I was three months into a seat I had taken from my own father, still proving to every old man in the family that I could hold what I had seized. I could not afford to look weak.
But what I felt was not anger.
“Your father says you’re good with numbers,” I said.
“My father says a lot of things.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Most of them are lies.”
“Is that one a lie?”
“No.” She lifted her chin higher. “That one happens to be true.”
“How good?”
“Good enough to know that the debt he owes you is inflated by at least thirty percent.” Her eyes locked onto mine. “Someone’s been cooking your books, Mr. Costa. If I were you, I’d be more concerned about that than about whatever you think you’re going to do with me.”
The room went very still.
I stood up slowly and walked around the desk. She did not step back. Did not flinch. Just watched me come with those dark eyes that gave nothing away.
“That’s a serious accusation,” I said.
“I’ve been looking at your operation for months. Trying to figure out how to get my father out from under it. And the more I looked, the more the numbers didn’t add up. Someone inside is skimming. Has been for a while.”
“And you’re telling me this because?”
“Because you seem like the kind of man who would want to know.” She tilted her head, studying me the way I was studying her. “And because it might be worth something to you. Information like that.”
“Worth your father’s debt?”
“Worth more than my father’s debt.” She smiled, small and sharp. “But I’ll settle for that. For now.”
I stared at her for a long moment. This debt that had walked into my house and turned everything upside down in the space of five minutes.
“Everyone out,” I said.
My men hesitated. Stefan raised an eyebrow from the doorway.
“I said out.” I did not raise my voice. I never had to. “Serra stays. Everyone else leaves.”
They left. The door closed behind them.
And then it was just me and this girl and her terrified father, who was staring at his daughter like he had never seen her before in his life.
I walked back to my desk and sat down. Opened a drawer. Pulled out a stack of ledgers and dropped them on the surface.
“Show me,” I said.
She blinked. “What?”
“The skimming. The cooked books.” I gestured at the ledgers. “You say you can find it. Find it.”
“You’re serious.”
“I don’t joke about money.” I leaned back in my chair. “You want to walk out of this house with your father and your dignity intact? Show me something I don’t already know.”
She looked at the ledgers. Looked at me. Looked at her father, who was trembling.
Then she walked forward, pulled a chair up to my desk, and sat down.
“This might take a while,” she said, reaching for the first ledger.
“I’ve got all night.”
It did not take all night.
It took two hours.
Two hours of watching her flip through pages, her brow furrowed, her lips moving silently as she ran numbers in her head.
Her father fell asleep in his chair halfway through. Neither of us noticed.
At the end of it, she looked up at me with something like triumph in her eyes.
“Benetti,” she said.
I went still. “What about him?”
“He’s your problem.” She tapped a line in the ledger. “He’s been running a side operation for at least a year. I’d estimate he’s taken you for about three hundred thousand, but I’d need more records to be certain.”
Marco Benetti. One of my father’s old lieutenants. A man who had sworn loyalty to me when I took the seat. Who had smiled at me across every meeting and called me Don and promised the old guard would follow.
And he had been stealing from me since the day I took power.
“You’re certain,” I said.
“I’m never wrong about numbers.” She pushed the ledger toward me. “Check it yourself if you don’t believe me. But you’ll find what I found.”
I looked at the ledger.
“You’ve proven how useful you are to me,” I said.
She blinked. “So the debt’s cleared.”
“No.” I closed the book. “Your father owes what he owes. To me, and to every family on this coast he’s borrowed against and burned.”
Her father startled awake at the word owes. He looked at me, then at his daughter, then back at me.
“Then why am I still standing here,” she said.
“Because I’m going to offer you a way to erase all of it. Not one debt. Every ledger with his name in it, up and down the coast, wiped clean in a single afternoon.”
“He doesn’t have that money.”
“He doesn’t need money.” I came around the desk and stopped in front of her. “You marry me.”
Her father made a sound. She did not look at him.
“Marry you,” she said, testing the shape of it.
“My name over yours, and your father walks out of every account on this coast a free man. No one collects on him again. No one dares, once he’s mine by marriage.”
“You could put a ring on any woman on this coast.” Her eyes stayed level. “Why me.”
“Because I don’t want a woman to wear my ring. I want the sharpest mind that’s walked through that door in ten years sitting at my right hand.” I held her gaze. “I’d rather have you counting my enemies than my exits. The marriage keeps you there. It buys your father his life. Both at once.”
“Liana,” her father tried.
“Be quiet, Papa.” She still did not look at him. “I won’t be a wife you use in the dark to settle his accounts. Ring or no ring.”
“Good. I’m not marrying you for a bed.” I put out my hand. “I’m marrying you for the mind. The rest of you stays yours until you decide otherwise. Do we have an arrangement, Miss Serra?”
She looked at my hand, then at my face.
Then she stood, took it, and shook it once.
“We have an arrangement, Mr. Costa.” Her grip was firm. “But if you try anything I haven’t offered, I’ll make you regret the day you opened that ledger.”
I laughed. Surprised and genuine, the first real laugh I’d had in months.
“I believe you,” I said. “I absolutely believe you will.”
We married before the week was out. Quiet, fast, a signature and a priest and her father weeping in the back pew over a debt he no longer owed.
I gave her an office, access to everything she needed to root out Benetti’s betrayal. She worked longer hours than anyone I employed. Asked sharper questions. Made men twice her age stammer and sweat.
And I found excuses to be where she was.
I told myself it was the arrangement. Due diligence. Making sure my investment paid what I’d married for.
I was lying, and I knew it.