I smiled through the tears that had begun to blur the words on the screen. A bitter, broken thing, that smile. Because in that moment I understood with perfect clarity that I had never once been welcomed in this household. Not truly. It had always been about status. About prestige. About what I could bring to the Salvatore name, and the answer, as far as they were concerned, had always been nothing.
Three years ago, I had been taken by mercenaries. Hired guns with no family allegiance, rogues who answered to no Commission and feared no code. They had snatched me from a car on a rain-slicked highway, and the world I knew had collapsed into darkness and concrete walls. My father, Don Vittorio Valducci, the Capo di tutti Capi, the most powerful man on the Eastern Seaboard, had torn the city apart searching for me. My brothers had not left a single stone unturned. Felix had personally ripped open the wreckage of a decoy vehicle with his bare hands, convinced I was inside. Giacomo had put a bounty on every mercenary crew from here to Chicago.