She Accused Me of Stealing My Own Business

At a family dinner, Don Vincenzo’s new pet, a dancer named Ava, came for me.

She puffed out her chest and slammed a ledger on the long table.

“Vincenzo, I accuse her! Skimming from the family business, our club ‘The Siren’s Song.’ Betraying the family!”

Every eye in the room turned on me, sharp as knives.

But Vincenzo, my boss… his face went hard.

I almost pitied the little dancer who’d crawled her way out of Brooklyn.

The “family business” she was talking about? It was my private club. A gift from my father.

I just lent it to Vincenzo when he was starting out, to give him a respectable front.

I lent it to him for two years, and now it’s family property?

I lent Don Vincenzo my private club. Now his new plaything thinks it’s hers, and she’s using it to come after me.

“Vincenzo, I accuse her! Skimming from the family business, betraying the family!”

Ava’s voice cut through the dining hall. She puffed out her chest and slammed a thick ledger on the long table.

I slowly set down my wine glass and looked at the dancer who’d crawled up from the streets of Brooklyn.

Poor thing. She had no idea what she was talking about.

“Look at these numbers!” Ava flipped through the cooked books, her finger jabbing at the red marks. “Every month, Isabella moved hundreds of thousands of dollars out of ‘The Siren’s Song’!”

She turned to Vincenzo, her voice trembling just right. “This is betrayal! Vincenzo, the family is expanding. We need every dime. If we don’t get rid of leeches like her, how can we expect the men to trust you?”

I felt a flash of pity for her.

The “family business” she was talking about was the private, hundred-million-dollar club my father left me.

I lent it to Vincenzo for two years when he was just starting out, so he’d have a place to hold court. And now it’s public property?

“Isabella. You got something to say?”

Vincenzo finally spoke, his voice cold as ice. His eyes scanned the sour faces of the family’s old guard before they landed on me. There was a strange, calculating look in them.

I looked at his familiar face and thought back to a snowy night twelve years ago.

I was a junior in college, studying for finals in the library, when I got the call about my father’s accident.

It was him. He drove me six hundred miles back to New York for the funeral in his beat-up secondhand car, right through a blizzard.

The car broke down on the way. He was on his back on the frozen asphalt in the middle of the night to fix it, his lips turning purple from the cold.

“Don’t worry, Bella,” he’d told me. “I’ll get you home.”

After my father died, I chose to work for him, to be the power behind his family.

But now, the man who’d once risked his life for