Chapter 4
CHAPTER 4
STEFANO
I didn’t want children. Didn’t want to be responsible for another generation of death and corruption. Didn’t want to create more pain for yet another Vignali.
But in my gut, I knew Valerie Salera's boy was mine.
And no one took what belonged to me.
Val had kept my son from me, and now there she sat, holding him in her arms, reading bedtime stories in front of the window, pretending like the boy didn’t have a father.
I inhaled through my nose and tightened my abs to control the conflicting emotions raging inside me.
She had taken the dream I once had, living it happily without me as if I never existed.
And I fucking hated her for it.
When the car turned onto the narrow tree-lined street in Brooklyn, my thoughts had shifted back in time.
The area didn’t feel like part of New York, despite its closeness to the Brooklyn Bridge. I used to imagine it as another world, a place removed from the rest of the city, transformed into a small, nameless town.
For a decade, I had stayed away, ignoring my desire to live another life outside the family business.
Even before my father and brother died, my dream had been nothing but a fantasy, an indulgence my family allowed.
After all, I wouldn’t inherit the business.
They’d done us all more harm than good by allowing me to dream like that.
My life had been simple back then, school two blocks away from Con Amore, a community college that fed students into NYU. I’d planned to transfer and become an English professor who shared his love of literature with bright, eager students.
My fantasy had driven my actions.
The perfect plan.
I would spend my days exploring Shakespeare and Dickens, then go home to a beautiful woman and the loving family we’d created together, where the hardest decision might have been which book to read to our kids before putting them to bed.
Then I would spend half the night making love to my wife
That had been the life I wanted.
Con Amore had been part of the dream too, starting out as a haven for me, my preferred home away from home.
Until everything changed one brisk day about ten years ago.
The day Val started working at the café.
The most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
Light blue eyes. Rich, dark hair framing her pretty face. Her tight little body, made for me to touch, taste, worship.
I scoffed and pushed my fingers back through my hair, remembering the first thought I’d had about her that day, that she must have been an angel.
Then she let out her wicked laugh, and later, when she took my order, I could see the mischief dancing in her eyes.
An angel alright… e il diavola .
And fucking intoxicating.
Everything had changed for me that day. The café became more than a quiet place to study and focus on my career. It became the place where I counted on seeing Val, where I watched her move around the room, chatting and laughing with customers.
I showed up every day, not for the best cup of coffee anymore, but to hear her throaty laughter when I flirted with her.
After meeting her, my dream evolved from having some faceless, ideal woman to care for my children and keep our home and love me for me to having Valerie.
Always Valerie.
Still Valerie.
In the beginning, she didn't know about my family. I’d used a fake name and never gave her any reason to question it.
Had I felt guilty about lying to her? Absolutely.
After a few weeks, being Stefano Salvatore became quite comfortable, and I didn’t want to let him go. At college and the café, Stefano Vignali, second son of a notorious New York mafia don, my brother’s spare, didn’t exist.
When Val came along, she represented everything young, normal Stefano Salvatore wanted. A happy family. A quiet life without vengeance and violence.
Then, in just one day, when the Commission killed my father and my brother, I lost it all.
The sight of Valerie now, sitting where we once sat together, drinking her tea, and reading to her child, brought all the unwanted memories back.
I preferred to keep the past in the past. It helped me get through each day as the man I’d become. But seeing Val again made it impossible to keep the memories at bay, impossible to not feel the agony burst inside my chest all over again.
Ten years had passed between us.
I squinted, staring harder at her through the window, and even with only the light from the streetlamp washing over her, she still looked as beautiful as the day I first met her.
The photos in that fucking envelope failed to do her justice.
From my angle in the back of the car, my view of the boy was impeded. I could only see the top of his head, tucked under his mother’s chin. A book covered his face.
My men headed for the café first. Standard protocol. Safety and all that bullshit.
“Call me when it’s clear and be quick about it,” I said.
Val had already noticed the car and now my men heading to her front door.
She said something to the boy.
I had no time to get a look at his face. The boy was on his feet in seconds, and when my men stepped through the front door, Val grabbed the kid and yanked him behind her.
Definitely her son.
Instinct like that only came from a mother.
More memories flashed through my head, twisting and turning, bubbling up like nostalgic fantasies just out of reach. Warm and soft at first, loving, freeing, then nauseating, pulsing with a hot, permeating hatred.
I couldn’t make it stop.
The muscles in my jaw tightened.
How dare she hide him from me but keep him close enough for my enemies to find? How dare she keep my son from me?
He had been so close his entire life, and I missed everything.
I don’t even know his goddamn name!
How dare she hold my son like that in front of a window, where anyone could see him and hurt him or think of taking him?
The boy had been devastatingly vulnerable all these years, and she allowed that to happen.
Val knew danger would follow any child of mine. The day she found out about my real identity, she said she didn’t want me anymore, said she refused to be with someone like me.
She’d been afraid of the Vignali way of life.
Afraid of me.
Yet there she sat with him, in front of a big fucking window, putting herself and my son in danger. Anyone with a rifle and a vendetta against me could take his best shot.
Clearly, being safe had been another one of her lies.
How little this woman really knew about my world, or even the bigger picture that spanned beyond my own expanding control.
I jerked my neck to ease the pressure, tugged at my collar.
Didn’t she follow the fucking news?
The world was full of madmen, sick pedophiles, and lunatics running amuck in the city.
But she thought it safe enough to be on the couch in front of a window, practically lounging in the spotlight like she lived in fucking Mayberry.
No more waiting.
No one in that café could take me out.
I got out of the car and walked into Con Amore, using each step to focus on the rage simmering in my gut.
To rein it in.
My pulse pounded in my ears as I entered the building, and I flexed my clenched fists.
“All clear, boss,” Tony said into his phone. “She’s here.”
“Yes, I can see that,” I said behind him.
After glancing back at me over their shoulders, Tony and Bruce stepped out of my way.
The second Val saw me, her gorgeous eyes got wider, her pretty lips parted, and her face paled.
Fuck. Still so beautiful.
The boy wanted to step in front of her like a shield, but she yanked him back.
“Mama, who is that?” he asked, his voice calm and strong.
Either he didn’t scare easily, or he knew how to put on one hell of a brave face.
“What are you doing here?” Val asked.
Even through that breathless whisper, her voice still shook. She couldn’t pretend nearly as well as her son.
Despite the tightening grip I clenched around my entire being now, holding myself back from the worst of what I wanted to do, the anger in my voice slipped through on its own.
“I think you know what I'm doing here, Valerie.”
The boy snatched his arm away to get back in front of her.
“Mama?” he asked again.
She gasped and lunged after him, but he had already stepped beyond her reach. Or maybe she had finally given in to the futility of trying to withstand me.
The boy looked me up and down, his brow creasing with a single thin line that made me feel like I’d glanced in a mirror.
He had my mother’s golden curls and Val’s chin. Beyond that, everything else was mine. Our eyes were exactly the same, the shape, the blue so dark it appeared almost black.
I didn’t need to wait for DNA test results.
This kid was my son.
Everything I had sacrificed in my life, every solemn oath I swore to myself—all of it went out the window with that truth.
I didn't want children, not because I wouldn’t make a good father, but because any child of mine could never fully claim his future as his own.
And now the boy standing in front of me, so brave and stoic, no longer had the options his mother believed she’d protected for him. The world might have been his oyster, sure, but this child could never leave the sea.
Not now that someone had discovered him.
“Why are you here?” Val asked again, a touch more stability in her tone.
I cut my gaze away from the boy and fixed it on her.
“You tell me,” I said coldly. “Why would I be here after nearly a fucking decade? What could have possibly brought me across the bridge to this shithole neighborhood again?”
I moved toward her, and she instinctively stepped back, taking the boy with her.
My presence terrified her. Yet another knife in my back.
It had taken me months to stop seeing the horror on her face when she discovered my real name. And there I stood, seeing it again as if no time had passed, and I hated it.
It was probably for the best.
She should be afraid. I was a dangerous man, and she had crossed me in the worst way imaginable.
As the boy struggled to get between his mother and me again, his hands balled into fists, and he scowled.
A mirror image of me again.
“Leave now,” he said. “I don’t know who you are, but we don’t want you here, and you can’t talk to my mother like that.”
“I believe I just did,” I countered.
Pride welled within me, conflicting with my anger.
Pride caused by the sight of my son filled with such brazen courage and certainty in his role as man of the house. A certainty I would have to break all too soon, because it was the only way to keep him safe now that his mother’s way had failed.
“And I have every right to speak to her however I choose,” I added while staring into her eyes.
“You absolutely do not,” Val said.
Hm. She’d recovered some of her own courage, or maybe she realized my men and I weren’t there to harm her or the child. Whatever the cause of her fortitude, it wouldn’t last long.
Not once we had the conversation I planned to have.
“Tony, Bruce.” I jerked my chin at the door without taking my eyes off her. “Get out.”
“Yes, sir.”
The acknowledgement came from both men at the same time as they left us. Neither one needed to be told I wanted them to watch the building from the outside, effectively leaving me alone with a broken version of the family I once wanted.
The door closed behind them with a tinny jingle of the bell hanging from the top of the frame.
“You owe me a new lock,” Val said.
I tilted my head. “You owe me an explanation.”
“I owe you nothing!” she spat.
If that was how she wanted to have the conversation, fine.
My gaze drifted to the coffee table in front of that damn couch by that fucking window, then I headed that way, my shoes clicking across the wood floor.
“Who’s his father, Val?”
“A soldier,” she snapped. “Killed in Iraq before we?—”
“Liar.”
I grabbed her teacup, the wet tea bag clinging to the empty ceramic, and threw it against the wall. The cup shattered, shards ricocheting off the wall and bouncing onto the couch cushions.
Val jumped and grabbed the boy again, but I hardly noticed much more than that.
With my pulse roaring in my ears, my only option was to move and keep moving.
Otherwise, I didn’t think I could stop myself from ripping the place apart with my bare hands before wrapping them around her throat and squeezing with all the fury I’d kept bottled up for ten years.
Sure, I’d had my heart broken before and my world turned upside down. But I had never in my life felt the way I did in that moment, there with her.
My guts almost reached my throat. A cold sweat sent hot and cold shivers racing across my overheating back, where the previous comfort of my shirt beneath the tailored suit jacket was now a stifling prison, holding me inside the cage of a body I could no longer control.
So much energy coursed through me, so much fucking rage and shame and regret. I could have sworn I saw goddamn red.
If I didn’t move my body, it would move itself for me in all the ways I’d never allowed before.
The monster would break free, not in the cellar where he did his best work, but there… in Brooklyn… in the open.
In front of my son.
Pushing my hands through my hair, I paced by the window, forcing my breath to slow and my mind to recognize the rhythm of my clicking footsteps.
Control was all I had.
If I lost it, what the fuck did I have left?
After more pacing, I turned to the boy.
The first question that came to my mind, which seemed most important in the moment, was to ask him for his date of birth. As if such a simple answer would settle the situation between the three of us.
I opened my mouth to do just that.
A loud pop erupted somewhere on the street behind me, and a split second later, the window shattered.
I leaped at the boy, then threw us both over the couch.
Pain seared through my arm.
And more bullets railed through Con Amore.