THE BRIDE'S TORN VEIL AND THE SECRET THAT SHATTERED A MAFIA EMPIRE

Grace screamed.

It wasn't a polite cry. It was the primal, terrifying sound of a mother lion realizing the cage had already been breached.

In my chest, my heart seemed to stop beating altogether. My seventy-one-year-old mother—who walked with a cane and had a bad heart—was sitting in our two-bedroom apartment in Pilsen right now with four-year-old Leo.

"Emily, your phone!" Grace lunged toward me, grabbing my forearms with icy fingers. "Call your mother! Right now!"

Luca didn't let go of Daniel's throat. If anything, the tendons in Luca's neck stood out like steel cables as he lifted the younger man an inch off his heels against the marble column.

"How did you get a bracelet that was at my maid's apartment two hours ago?" Luca's voice was a low, lethal growl in Daniel's face. "Answer me before I crush your windpipe."

Daniel's face was turning purple. He slapped weakly at Luca's wrist, his polished black dress shoes scraping against the baseboard.

"Daddy, let him breathe so he can talk!" Lily cried, terrified not for Daniel, but because she knew what her father was capable of when pushed past the edge.

Luca loosened his grip by half an inch. Daniel slumped against the pillar, coughing violently, his hand clutching his bruised neck.

Meanwhile, my shaking thumb was already hitting my mother's speed dial on my cracked cell phone. I pressed it to my ear.

It rang once. Twice. Three times.

Please pick up, Mom. Please pick up.

On the fourth ring, the line clicked.

"Emily?" My mother's voice sounded breathless and frightened. In the background, I didn't hear the television cartoons we usually left on for Leo. I heard a small child crying softly.

"Mom! Are you okay? Where's Leo?" I put the phone on speaker before I even realized I was doing it, holding it out between Grace and me.

"Oh, thank God you called, mija," my mother said, her voice trembling over the small speaker. "Twenty minutes ago, a man in a black suit came to the door with Mrs. Moretti's bakery pay stub. He said Mrs. Moretti sent him to pick up Leo's spare medicine bag and his medical bracelet to bring to the wedding. When Leo ran into the hallway and saw the man, he got scared and hid behind my chair. The man just grabbed the bracelet off the kitchen table and left—Wait, Emily, someone is sitting in a black SUV downstairs right outside our building!"

Grace sagged against the white wedding chairs, gripping her chest as if she couldn't get air into her lungs.

"Mom, lock the deadbolt," I said, my voice shaking with a cold rage I had never felt in my twenty-five years. "Take Leo into the bathroom, close the door, and don't open it for anyone unless you hear my voice."

"I'm scared, Emmy," a tiny, high-pitched voice whimpered over the speaker.

It was Leo. He was only four, and his little voice was thick with tears and a wheezing cough that meant his asthma was flaring up from crying. "Where's Nana Grace? Did the bad man take my truck?"

"No, baby, nobody took your truck," Grace choked out, leaning right down over my hand to speak into the microphone. Her whole body was trembling, yet she forced her voice to sound warm and steady. "Nana Grace is right here, Leo. You sit on the rug with Grandma Carter and count her buttons like we always do, okay? Count to twenty for me."

"One... two..." Leo sniffled over the line before my mother hurried them into the bathroom and clicked the lock shut.

Luca had let go of Daniel completely.

He was standing motionless in the middle of the aisle, staring at the phone in my hand. The ruthless head of the Moretti family looked as though someone had struck him across the chest with a sledgehammer.

He walked slowly toward the side door, yanked it open, and barked a single sentence to Marco waiting in the vestibule: "Send four cars to Emily's mother's address in Pilsen right now—lights on, heavy cover—and if there's a black SUV parked out front, pull the driver out through the window and hold him for me."

Then Luca closed the door, locked the deadbolt from the inside, and turned back to the four of us.

"Wait a minute," Selena said, her voice rising in panic as she looked at her nephew slumped against the pillar. "Daniel, what did you do? You told me you only needed to scare Lily into walking down the aisle! You didn't tell me you were following the maid to some kid's house!"

"I had to have insurance!" Daniel rasped, rubbing his throat as he glared up at Luca with desperate defiance. "Do you think I'm an idiot, Aunt Selena? I knew Lily was losing her nerve this morning! When I had my guy follow Grace from the bakery yesterday, we saw the maid drop the kid off with her. I didn't know who the kid was until I looked at the birth certificate in Grace's glove box this morning while she was inside the church!"

Daniel grinned ugly and crooked, wiping a trace of spit from his lip as he looked straight at Luca.

"Go ahead and hit me again, Luca," Daniel jeered, though his eyes were wild with fear. "You won't touch me once you hear who that little boy is. Your precious wife hasn't been hiding some charity case from a car crash on Lake Shore Drive."

"Daniel, shut your mouth!" Grace screamed, stepping toward him.

"Why?" Daniel laughed harshly. "Because for a whole year, Luca thought you were a saint while he slept with my aunt? Tell him, Grace! Tell your daughter whose name is listed as the father on that four-year-old boy's birth certificate!"

Lily froze. She looked from Daniel to her forty-nine-year-old mother, her face paling to the color of her ivory veil.

"Mom?" Lily whispered, her voice cracking with disbelief. "Four years ago... you and Daddy were still living together. You didn't have another child four years ago. Who is the mother on that birth certificate?"

Daniel reached into his inner tuxedo pocket and pulled out a folded, blue-bordered Cook County birth certificate he had stolen from Grace's old sedan that morning. He threw it onto the white runner at Luca's feet.

Luca bent down and picked it up.

As he unfolded the paper and read the two names printed in the parent boxes, the blood drained completely from his face. His hand actually shook.

"No," Luca whispered, looking up at Grace with eyes full of shattering grief. "Grace... why didn't you tell me?"

Lily snatched the paper from her father's fingers. She looked down at the document, and then she let out a sound so broken it made the hair on my arms stand up.

"Mother: Clara Moretti," Lily read aloud, her knees giving way until I caught her around the waist. She stared up at her father and mother in horror. "My older sister? You told me Clara died in a car crash in Boston five years ago! Who is the father—?!"