MARRIED TO THE MAFIA KING WHO KILLED MY FATHER

The bullet had his name on it.

Valeria knew because she had written it herself... in the small leather notebook under her mattress, the one with the cracked spine and the coffee stain on the cover. Three words on the first page, the night of her father's funeral when she was nineteen and the world had caved in on her.

Lorenzo De Luca. Dead.

Five years of planning. Tonight she was finally ready.

"Talk to me, Val." Rino's voice cut sharp through the earpiece. "Guards rotate the east wall in three minutes. You need to move."

"I'm moving."

"You're standing still."

"Rino." She pressed her back flat against the stone ledge, rain soaking through her jacket. "What does moving look like from your angle?"

"Like a woman who's been on this rooftop forty minutes doing nothing."

"I'm thinking."

"Think faster. Ninety seconds."

She wasn't thinking. She was watching him... Lorenzo De Luca through the scope. Courtyard below. No jacket, sleeves rolled, phone to his ear. Standing like a man who had never once imagined someone might be aiming at his skull from two hundred meters up.

Arrogant. Everything about him screamed it.

He was about to find out how wrong that was.

"Sixty seconds, Val."

Slow breath in. Slower out. Her father's voice somewhere in the back of her head, steady hands, piccola. Never rush the thing you can only do once.

Her finger curved around the trigger.

She never heard them coming.

One second the scope was perfectly aligned. The next, the rifle was gone... ripped from her grip and her face hit concrete hard enough to split her lip. A knee drove into her spine. Zip tie on her wrists before she could even process it.

She twisted, got her knee into a ribcage, heard someone curse.

Then a forearm across her throat killed the fight completely.

"Don't." The voice was almost bored.

Five men. She counted from the ground. Tactical gear, weapons drawn, positioned like they'd been there for hours.

They'd known she was coming.

"Val? Val, what's-" Rino's voice cut to static.

Just rain. Just five pairs of boots on wet concrete and the fountain still running in the courtyard below like absolutely nothing had happened.

The hood came off in a study that smelled of cedarwood and old money.

Dark wood. Books that had actually been read. A dead fire. Rain on tall windows.

Behind the desk is Lorenzo De Luca.

Nothing like what five years of hatred had built. She had expected a monster. Instead he sat with one leg crossed, jacket off, looking at her with the patience of a man who had already decided how this conversation ended.

Dark eyes. A jaw that had taken hits and not moved. A thin white scar near his left temple, someone had gotten close enough to mark him once.

Just once.

He let the silence stretch. She refused to fill it.

He spoke first.

"You're bleeding," he said.

She'd forgotten about her lip. She said