Chapter 4
Greta told her everything, the way a person tells a secret they no longer need, because the person hearing it isn’t going to live long enough to repeat it. Two million dollars. A villa in Tuscany. Months of patient, careful dosing — a drop a day of something imported from a private laboratory in Zurich, untraceable, engineered so precisely to mimic organ failure that the finest doctors in New York had been completely fooled.
“You poisoned him,” Mara breathed, horror curdling into something else entirely — a hot, maternal fury that had nowhere to go and everywhere to burn. “He wasn’t sick. You were killing a newborn baby under his own father’s roof.”
“Not me,” Greta corrected, almost offended by the accusation, as if murder-for-hire had rules of etiquette. “I just delivered the meals.”
She raised the gun, steady and certain, already narrating the story she planned to tell Damiano — a grieving mother, driven mad by loss, who had turned violent in the night. A tragedy. Nothing more.
But Greta had made one critical mistake. She assumed the hollow-eyed maid standing in front of her was still the broken woman who had arrived at this estate three days ago with nothing left to lose. She didn’t know what surviving Cole Mercer had built inside Mara Quinn — the reflex that fired the instant a weapon was raised, the hard-won, permanent understanding that freezing was how you died.
Mara moved first. The open bottle of poisoned formula went flying into Greta’s face, buying half a second of chaos that Mara used to snatch the still-scalding kettle from the counter and swing it with every ounce of strength she had left. Bone cracked against metal. Scalding water sprayed across Greta’s skin. The gun skittered across the hardwood, and Mara kicked it under the island and ran — not toward escape. Toward the nursery. Toward Nico.
She never made it. The heavy oak door splintered open before she could reach it, and Damiano stood in the frame, shirtless, a massive pistol in his hand, the mafia don’s terrifying calm stripped clean away and replaced with something feral. The truth spilled out of her in a shaking voice. Within minutes, Greta was dragged screaming toward the soundproof basement, choking out a single name that turned Damiano Moretti’s blood to ice.
Vittoria.
His dead wife’s own sister. The woman who had stood weeping at the funeral, who had held his hand at the graveside, who had leaned over his son’s crib wearing an expression of unbearable tenderness that — Mara now understood — had been theater from the very first second.
May you like
The name moved through the mansion like a weather front. Guards’ faces went gray. Doors closed. By six the next morning, the estate was empty.
Damiano wasn’t taking chances twice.
