All Chapters of THE DON'S SECRET HEIR: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

70 Chapters

No Choice

I was on my third glass of wine when he said it."You will marry Luca Moretti. Before winter."I kept my eyes on my glass. Swirled what was left in it, set it down slow, then looked up at him."No Papa."Mama went stiff beside me.Every time she felt afraid, which was frequently at this table, I could feel it without having to look. She had learned how to shrink herself at the appropriate times over her entire marriage in this house.I used to wonder how she lived like that. Now I just felt sorry for her and a little angry at her and I hated myself for the angry part so I didn't sit with it long.Papa didn't react. That was the thing about him that people outside this family never really understood. Carlo Greco didn't raise his voice. He raised nothing.He just got very quiet and let the quiet do the work for him. I'd grown up with it my whole life and it still got under my skin. I hated that it still got under my skin.He glanced at me from the other side of the table. Long enough th

Sunday Dinner

Sunday came and I wasn't ready for it.Three days I'd spent trying to find a way out and got absolutely nowhere. Called my cousin Fia in Rome on Friday she'd married out of this life a few years back and I thought maybe she'd have something useful. She listened to everything I said and told me to pray. I hung up on her.Thought about going to my mother maybe four or five times. Talked myself out of it every single time. I kept seeing her hand on my knee at dinner, that hard grip, and I just couldn't. Couldn't walk into her room and drop something else on her that she'd carry by herself in silence.By Saturday night I'd made my peace with going in empty. No angle, nothing. Just me and whatever face I could hold together for a few hours.I was good at faces. Grew up here didn't I.He handed his keys off without even glancing at the guy holding his hand out for them. Just didn't look. Not mean about it, not deliberate.Just genuinely didn't occur to him that there was a person standing t

The Night Before Everything Changed

The engagement dinner was twelve days away.I counted every single one. Woke up each morning and subtracted from whatever number I'd gone to sleep with. Twelve became eleven became ten and I just watched them disappear like I had any power to slow them down.Papa was happy those days. That particular satisfied version of him that made the whole house breathe easier staff smiled more, meals were lighter, even the walls seemed to relax somehow.I'd grown up watching how his mood controlled the temperature of every room in this place. One man's contentment running through an entire household like a current.I used it. Smiled at breakfast, asked about his week, became temporarily the daughter he most wanted me to be. I needed his eyes pointed somewhere else.Meanwhile I couldn't get that bottle out of my head.Nine days I sat with it before I went to Klaus.Wanted to go sooner. Every night I nearly did. But I needed to understand what I was holding before I handed any of it to someone els

The Don From Palermo

Franco Moretti was not a big man.That was the first thing that surprised me when the car door opened Friday evening.I'd built him up in my head into something enormous years of my father speaking about him in that particular careful tone he reserved for people he genuinely respected, which was maybe four people alive and what stepped out onto our gravel drive was a compact, silver haired man in his late sixties with a walking stick he clearly didn't need and eyes that moved over everything like a camera taking inventory.They moved over me last.I stood at the door the way Papa asked. Green dress, hair up, the whole picture of a respectful future daughter in law. I smiled when Luca came around the car behind his father and I smiled when the two sisters climbed out after, younger than I expected, pretty in an expensive way.Franco Moretti looked at my face for maybe three seconds.Then he looked at Luca.Something passed between them that I wasn't meant to understand. Then the old ma

What I Did to Survive

No flowers, no music, nobody crying happy tears in the front rows. Just two families in Papa's formal sitting room on a Saturday evening and a man in a grey suit making it legal. I wore cream because it was the least wedding thing I owned.Giulia and Marta sat together near the back looking expensive and bored. Mama was by the window doing that thing with her face she did at difficult occasions arranged into something that passed for calm if you didn't know her well enough to see through it.Papa was glowing. Genuinely. I hadn't seen him look like that in years.Twenty minutes maybe. Words, papers, and then a ring on my finger that sat heavy and cold and completely wrong.Franco came to me first when it was done. Took my hand, looked at the ring, then looked at my face and I stood there and smiled and let him do his last check."Welcome to the family," he said."Thank you." Bright and easy and completely hollow.He held my hand a beat too long. Then let go and moved off toward Papa a

The Wolf's Daughter

I was sixteen the first time I watched my father have a man killed.I wasn't supposed to be there. Came down for water at two in the morning, barefoot on the cold marble stairs, and stopped three steps from the bottom when I heard the sounds from the east wing.Not shouting, Papa never shouted. Something worse than shouting. The particular quality of noise that told you a person had moved past the point of asking for anything.I should have gone back upstairs.The east room door was open two inches. Enough.The man was on his knees on the stone floor with his wrists tied behind him and his face already past the point of looking like a face. Two of Papa's men stood back against the wall. Papa himself sat in a chair in his shirtsleeves with a glass of something amber, watching with the same expression he wore reading his morning paper.The man said something. Wet and broken, barely words.Papa set his glass down with a small precise click."You stole from me three times," he said. Almos

What Love Costs In This World

I learned what love cost in this world the summer I turned seventeen.His name was Dante Ricci. Not someone I loved someone my best friend Chiara loved, quietly and completely, the way girls that age loved things they had no business loving inside a world like ours.Dante was twenty three, worked the docks, had easy hands and an easier smile and absolutely no idea whose daughter Chiara's mother was.Chiara's mother was my father's cousin.Which meant Chiara was Greco adjacent not fully inside it, not carrying the name, but close enough that certain rules applied without anyone ever writing them down.The rule that applied here was simple. Girls from families like ours did not attach themselves to dock workers with easy smiles without someone deciding something about it.I found out what had been decided on a Tuesday morning when Chiara called me from a phone that wasn't hers, voice completely flat in the way voices went flat when feeling things had become temporarily impossible.Dante

The Garden At Night

The garden existed in two versions.The daytime version belonged to the house. Gardeners came three times a week, kept the roses disciplined, trimmed everything into the kind of controlled beauty my father required of everything he owned.Visitors complimented it. Mama accepted those compliments graciously even though she had nothing to do with it the garden was maintained by staff the same way everything in this house was maintained. Efficiently. Without sentiment.The night version was mine.Nobody came to the back garden after dark. Staff went home or to quarters. My father's men patrolled the perimeter wall but the interior grounds were considered secure and therefore left alone.Cameras covered the front and the gate but the east corner near the jasmine wall sat in a blind spot that had existed since the system was installed when I was twelve.I found it when I was thirteen.Never told anyone.Some information you kept because keeping it was the only power you had.Klaus came ove

The Bottle In The Drawer

The bottle had been in my drawer for eleven days before I understood what it actually was.Not chemically Rosa had given me enough of that in the kitchen without giving me too much. Something that made things appear different than they were. Old remedy. Women used it when they needed to manage a situation. I understood the mechanics.What I mean is I understood what it meant that my mother had it.That took eleven days of turning it over in my hands at night and thinking about Elena Greco who she had been before she became my father's wife, who she was inside that marriage, what she had needed and when and whether anyone had ever asked.My mother was not a woman who talked about herself. She talked around herself with great skill deflecting with grace, redirecting with warmth, keeping the actual interior of her life private in a way that looked like openness if you weren't paying close enough attention.I had grown up watching her do it across a thousand dinner tables and social occ

What Rosa Knew

Rosa Abbate had been with the Greco family for twenty three years.She had come to the estate at thirty seven widowed, two sons already grown, needing work and finding it through a cousin who knew someone who knew someone, which was how most things moved in this city. She had walked into the Greco kitchen and taken it over within a week and never looked back.She knew everything.Not because she sought it out Rosa was not a gossip, not a schemer, not the kind of woman who pressed her ear to doors. She knew everything because twenty three years in a house like this one meant that everything eventually passed through the kitchen. Men talked when they were fed.Staff talked when they thought nobody was listening. And Rosa, moving quietly between the stove and the counter with her back to the room, was the most invisible kind of witness the kind that nobody counted because nobody thought to.She had watched me grow up.Had brought me warm milk when I was small and couldn't sleep. Had t

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP