Chapter One

Diana

I’ve always liked the snow.

I think that sitting here, watching the snowfall covering every inch of my family’s home, is one of the more peaceful ways to spend an evening.

My mom’s been searching for me for the better part of half an hour now. I’ve heard her walking up and down the halls, first calling my name and then screeching it. Dunno why she didn’t think to check the balcony; I’m always out here.

Since Nathaniel went missing, she is holding onto me far more tightly. Too tightly. It’s not that I don’t love my mother, or that I have a bad relationship with her, because I don’t. Most days, my mother is one of my very best friends, but since her son—my brother, also known as the head of the Angelo family—Nathaniel went missing, she’s been a little less composed.

She plays the dutiful, stoic leader and stands in whenever there’s anybody around, but whenever it’s just the two of us and those loyal to the Angelo family in the house, she can get a little neurotic.

I get it.

She’s lost her son, her oldest child, and she’s left with me. Nathaniel is the sort of man you can turn to for anything at all; he fit my father’s shoes perfectly whenever he stepped in as head of the family. I know she worries that if an unknown something happened to Nathaniel of all people, it might very well happen to me as well.

She’s been waiting for a ransom call—we all have—for some news as to his condition, and things have been painfully silent. My mother had no desire to be head of this family; she never wanted to run the empire any more than I have. The stress of it alone has been doing terrible things to both her body and her persona.

Nathaniel was always more like Dad, loud and larger than life. Being the head of the family was never a burden to him. It was a crown that he was happy to wear, and he was well suited for it. I was more than happy to let him handle the whole thing. Even if a woman was allowed to run the show as head of the family, I wouldn’t have wanted it anyway. It was too starchy, and I like my freedom. Just another reason why I like driving.

There’s no way to know what happened to Nathaniel or where he might be, but I know in my bones that he’s alive somewhere. We have the best private investigators and our entire network of contacts working on finding out leads and information.

I just hope they find something soon.

I think that’s the second biggest worry in my mother’s mind, that without a male to lead the family she’s not sure how long she will be able to bide our time before the vultures start to circle, intent on picking apart the famous Angelo family bit by bit.

Perhaps that’s why I need my alone time even more right now.

Sometimes looking my mother in the face and seeing the silent question of if Nathaniel is dead or not on her features is more than I can handle.

Attached to my bedroom is a small balcony, the sort of setup that is great for reading while enjoying early morning coffee. The view of the grounds is absolutely stunning. You can see everything for at least half a mile, and it’s high up enough to see clearly over the stables. My mother will likely head down there next to where her beloved racing horses are barned, being kept warm and well cared for by a whole team of equestrians. I’ve always liked it down there, but I’ve never been much of a rider.

Beside my balcony, the roof slants downward and is easy enough to step onto. I’m sitting there now, listening to her searching through the open balcony doors. The carpet just inside of my room is going to be soaked through with the melted snow, and I just can’t bring myself to care. It’s peaceful, and after the day that I’ve had, I need peace. Whatever my mother wants me to do is just going to have to wait.

I pull my blanket further around my shoulders, pulling my glass of red wine closer to my body as the snow swallows up all of the sounds around me. The entirety of our property is blanketed in white.

Sure enough, moments later, warm yellow light spills out over the grounds below me, disrupting the stillness of the night, and my mother starts stomping her way out toward the stables in search of me. She’ll get distracted in there. She always does. I chuckle to myself, content to spend my evening attempting to uncoil the knots of tension and dread that have taken hold of my shoulders and threaten to cripple me.

The door to my bedroom slams open, and I nearly fumble the wine right out of my hand.

“Miss!”

I don’t have time to even clamber off the roof before the owner of the voice is stomping through my room. She slammed the door so hard behind her that I can hear the thing bounce in the frame before she comes barreling onto the balcony.

“Oh, Diana! It’s the worst thing ever!” Violet wails. She’s never been very good as a maid, but she’s always been a much better friend to me. I think we blurred the lines between staff and friendship too far, too long ago to even attempt to put things back the way they were. She could stop working tomorrow, and I think she would still stay here on payroll just so that I can hang out with her every day.

If it were anybody else, I might have taken more offense to the intrusion, or at the very least I might seem slightly more concerned about the tone that she’s using. The clear urgency is written all over her face, but the unfortunate truth of the matter is that Violet’s always been on the dramatic side. Until I know what the cause for the theatrics is, I don’t know what level of invested I need to be.

“What is it, V? You know that I can’t understand you when you cry that hard.” My voice is nothing but patient as I scoot from the roof tiles toward my friend. I make it to the edge of the roof before she throws herself at me, and I’m forced to scoop her up into my blanket as I hold her.

“V, you’re trembling.” My hands rub in alternating directions, wrapped in blanket, up and down her back. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

If she makes me guess then we are going to be here for a long, long time. Last week she cried because the blueberries in the pancakes she made me didn’t come out the way that she wanted them to. I’ve seen her cry because a puppy was too cute, and she couldn’t physically process it. I saw her break her arm once, and she hardly even flinched. She’s never reacted to things in the way that I would have thought that she would. This could be anything from a chipped nail to her mother’s death.

“It’s Thomas!”

My shoulders relax, something she takes instant offense to and pulls away.

“No! Diana, it’s not what you think!”

“And what do I think, V? Did you break up again?”

“What?! No!” she blubbers, as if that hadn’t happened twice last week, not that she ever let that impressively sized rock off her finger for a second. They had called off their wedding more times than I could count. At this point, I was almost going to take the bet that Girard, my butler, kept offering me as to whether or not she was actually going to make it down the aisle to Thomas. I didn’t mind the guy; he was a security guard assigned to the perimeters of our house. They had a really cute little love story, but man, was it hard to keep up with them.

“Then what happened?”

“They took him!”

That sobers me up quickly. “Who took him? Tell me exactly what happened, V,” I say seriously, my hands gripping her arms and forcing her to look into my eyes. Her normally pale face is ruddy and peppered with splotches from her crying.  Her gorgeous red hair is a halo of messy curls sticking out of the bun that she attempts to wrangle it into for work, but it nearly always comes undone over the course of the day. She looks like she’s been crying a while.

“I—” Violet sniffs. She pulls away from me and starts pacing the length of my balcony like the rapidly thickening snow if of no consequence to her whatsoever. “I don’t know…he was at his new job when he called me.”

“The moonlighting one?”

Violet nods, “Mmhm, the one he’s been doing to get those store discounts that he likes. He’s trying to let me redecorate our space before the wedding; he’s sweet like that.” Violet’s chin dimples as if him being sweet and indulging in her rapidly changing opinions on decor makes her miss him even more. “We were on the phone, and he started whispering to me really fast. I tried to tell him that I couldn’t understand what he was saying and he needed to slow down…that I couldn’t hear him. And he shushed me, which he never does. And then he got real quiet…it switched over to a video call, but then he dropped the phone and-and there were feet, and they came up on him real quiet, and I could see them fighting, and then he hit the ground. My baby, he fell to the ground, and I couldn’t do anything. And they took him—they took him away.”

“Who took him, V? Did you see any of their faces?” I’m already switching into defensive mode; that internal training and my desire to constantly fix things is already kicking in hard. “Tell me he told you who they were…or what he thought. Tell me that he told you something that will help us get him back.”

Violet flusters, and I can see her attempting to squash down the dramatics and recall anything that might be useful.

“He didn’t do anything, did he? I know you hate talking about it, V, but he did have that gambling problem…are you sure that it wasn’t—”

“No! I’ve been watching our accounts so close, and he’s banned from like all of the bars here. You know that. He can’t even step foot into a casino, and I thank you for that, so much. He said something about the Lords…”

My jaw tightens, anger heating my core, and suddenly I can’t feel the snow at all. “Rat bastards,” I swear, my teeth grinding together. “What could they want with Thomas? Everybody knows that he does guard work for us. He’s supposed to be protected.”

As is everybody that works for the Angelo family. We’re a bit of a big deal, something that I choose not to acknowledge overly often unless it suits me. Plenty of people would love to be the beloved daughter of a powerful mafia family, sure—and then there’s the Angelo family. We’re practically royalty in this town, rivaled by only one family: the Lords.

If they have the nerve to interfere with our business…that’s not a misunderstanding.

“What am I going to do?!” Violet’s lip sucks between her teeth, the panic gripping her again. “What if they hurt him? I can’t lose him, Diana. I can’t…I love him.”

“I know you do, V. Nothing bad is going to happen to him.”

She came to me for a reason after all.

“I’m going to fix this. Right now. Don’t you worry.” I wrap her into my blanket and pull the edges around her tightly, leaning in to kiss her forehead in a friendly gesture. “You sit here and flip through channels or something to kill the time, and I’ll be back with Thomas before you know it.”

“What are you going to do?!”

“I may not like it, but I know the Lord family very well, V. They will talk to me if I show up on their door, and it’s going to mean a hell of a lot more coming from me and asking soft questions than it will if my mom goes over there and starts throwing around accusations, don’t you think?”

Violet looks like she might want to protest but thinks better of it. Even if she did, I’ve made up my mind, and there’s no way that I’m going to change it. “The snow…Diana, you can’t go. Haven’t you heard the news? They are saying that a blizzard is supposed to hit town any hour now. They’ve been telling people to stock up on candles and water in case we are all without power for a few days. I can’t let you go out there.”

“Let me?”

“You can’t go! Thomas is already missing. I’m not going to have you chasing after him on my behalf and then have to have a search team dig you and your car out of a snowbank weeks from now because you got swallowed by the blizzard!”

I stop, looking out over the grounds once more. I take extra care to study the sky, judging the clouds and how the snow is presently falling, and shake my head. “No, I’ll be fine. I just have to go now.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“That’s not necessary; they are supposedly friends of my family these days. I can handle myself, V.”

“I know that you can, but I cannot have that fear on my conscious. I am going with you, and that’s final. At least that way your mom won’t blame me if something happens to you.”

I laugh, crossing to my massive walk-in closet and flinging open the doors. I march inside and select a winter coat with faux fur trim I got at a PETA auction last year and pull on my snow boots. I toss another jacket out onto my bed for Violet, motioning for her to go ahead and put it on. There’s no room for debate, and she complies.

“The real question is which car do we take?” It’s not really a question. I definitely have my favorite out of the cars in the garage, but my heart belongs to my Range Rover. We take the back elevator down to the garage, and the lights turn on as we walk into the space. The waves of anxiety are practically radiating off of Violet as we move, but to her credit, she doesn’t say anything else. She doesn’t attempt to talk me out of driving either. The staff has given up on attempting to talk me out of driving myself places. I allow all of the other luxuries offered to me, but this is for me.

Violet is a statue in the seat beside me. We should have at least said something to my mom before leaving. I honestly don’t know what she would do if I didn’t return or if anything happened to me. My mother’s grip on me has been too tight with Nathaniel missing; she would never allow me to go to the Lord property in the dead of night. She would kill me herself if she knew what I was planning. She would insist on sending a small fleet of security with me, and we don’t have the time. If Thomas had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, or if he said the wrong thing to the wrong person, then I am exactly the right person to smooth things over.

I will not beg.

I refuse.

I could never beg to men like them, certainly not given my personal history with one Lord in particular, so we’ll just hope that it doesn’t come to that. They will listen to me, and if they don’t, then I will just have to make them.

Hostage negotiations aren’t my thing, but talking to arrogant men who think they know everything while also holding positions of power? Well, that I’ve been trained for my whole life. If they have Thomas, I’m going to get him back.

Chapter Two

Stephan

My arrival back into town was a little ahead of schedule.

I liked to make an entrance whenever I returned home from an extended period of time away, but I liked the element of surprise even better.

When I arrived at my family home, I thought that I might be awaited somehow anyway. My father tended to have a way of knowing just about everything that happened, most of all his only son’s arrival back home.

When the entryway was empty as I stepped inside out of the rapidly worsening snowstorm, I started to grow concerned.

Normally, my father would have made quite an elaborate deal out of parading the staff and any guests down to the entryway to greet me before insisting that he take me to the same restaurant that he always does, nevermind that it was never my favorite but my father’s favorite, but I was always happy to indulge him.

My gloves are yanked off my hands and tossed haphazardly over my shoulder; my scarf and jacket follow quickly after as I move into the belly of the large house. I couldn’t slow down long enough to pull my shoes from my feet, and they track fresh powder through the entry hall and then wet tracks on the plush carpet runner of the halls as I search for the man in question.

He summons me here in the black of night, and now he’s triggering my temper by making me wait. Whatever was so important that couldn’t be put into words in a text is now something that I absolutely must know. It’s been a little while since I’ve been back here, in my father’s home. I don’t have the time or patience to mentally track the changes that have been made or wonder if my room is still the same. Sentimental sap of an old man that I have, it was nearly impossible to convince him that as an adult I no longer needed to keep a childhood bedroom and would, in fact, be perfectly fine with a standard guest room when I visited, and he refused. He said it was insane to him to think that his only son wouldn’t have a dedicated space.

“Uncle William!” I bellow, waiting for him to show his round face, fully expecting for it to come popping around a corner at any moment. “Dad?!” I call even louder; surely they heard my car pull up. I had sent word that I would be back in the county this week. It’s not unusual for one or both of them to invite me over when I get back into town. It always feels like the only times that Dad ever allows himself to have a true break from the empire that he’s built is whenever I come back into town.

If he wanted to get drunk and play Pictionary all night, then he could just say that, but he doesn’t.

This is insane. Our property is simply too large to play this game and search every room. I set my feet on a course to my father’s office and pull my phone from my pocket, quickly dialing first my father and then my uncle and back again. William, my uncle, almost never has his phone on him, so that’s not usual for him to not answer. But my father never misses a phone call. The man always texts back within two hours, even if it’s the middle of the night.

He’s only ever been the stone-cold, ruthless mafia boss in public. Inside of these walls, he was never that person to me. Even if he used tough love rather liberally when it came to my upbringing, I never grew up without love.

The fact that he’s now missed five of my phone calls in a row…that’s what’s setting off the red flags in my head, blazing bright like beacons of warning that something is about to happen that I’m in no way prepared for.

William is seated in my father’s office. The supple leather armchair is used for guests that hold meetings with my father, but he’s sitting too stiff in it. William’s not a small man. Standing at six feet, he used to be an athlete but has physically softened with age, and his gut shows the rounding of a man who indulges in too much alcohol. He’s always had a round face, cherubic; he was like catnip to women in ways I never quite mastered.

William sits on the front edge of the chair, his spine too rigid as if he were in the middle of a conversation he couldn’t fathom having…but he’s alone. My father doesn’t sit across from him. I feel like I already know the news that I’m about to receive, even before he motions for me to sit down. “Have a seat, son.”

Would sitting make this news easier to hear? The knot in my throat forms before he even speaks, something about the way William’s jaw clenches, the sad look in his eyes, and I know. I just know.

My hand scrubs down the lower half of my face, and I stare at the seat offered to me as if the news cannot be real until I sit, that if I just keep standing here, he’s not about to tell me that my father is dead. If I sit there…then it’s all going to be real, and I don’t know if I’m ready for that. Can anybody really be ready for that?

My legs carry me to the chair, and I know I sit, but it all feels like a blur, a distant reality in which I’m allowed to live outside of my body. It’s a good thing that William doesn’t start speaking right away because my ears are ringing, and the room feels like it’s closing in on me.

I allow the moment of despair to last all of thirty seconds. Thirty seconds of wallow and ache, of mourning and a total, nearly consuming feeling of loss.

Then I push it away, and I will myself to be stone. I harden my exterior and narrow my focus to William and the fact that he needs to tell me what happened. “How?” There’s no need to beat around the bush, no need to worry about my emotions. It’s simpler to keep things clinical; I’ll have time for the rest of it later.

William swallows hard, as if he wants to offer me words of comfort or at least a playful slap to the side of my arm. “Shot.”

My head dips, and my hands clasp one another. My knuckles turn white with the force of my concentration.

“Caught bullets two nights ago. There was an ambush outside of our offices…” William trails off.

I have at least five follow-up questions to that statement, and William pauses to let me select them in the order I wish to ask them.

“Where were you?”

“Right beside him, all the way to the hospital. The doctors did everything that they could. The finest surgeons attempted to save him…but the damage was too much.”

I nod, unable to sit still; he should have called me. I would have flown home early. He could have gotten ahold of me, and I could have been here to be with my father for his last minutes. I would have taken a private jet and gotten here as fast as physically possible. Rage for the moments stolen surface, and I push those feelings down with the others. “Was he in pain?” The words come out too quickly, and I lift my hand to stop William from answering the question I didn’t mean to ask. I don’t want to know the answer. “Where are the bastards that shot my father?”

“We have everybody looking into it.”

That’s it? He must sense my affront to it because he keeps speaking.

“There’s more.”

“More than the fact that my father was gunned down in front of his own offices without provocation…and left to die on a surgeon’s table, and nobody thought to call me…you mean that there is more than that? You’ve had two nights to tell me, and you didn’t bother? There are arrangements to be made; there is business to attend to, not to mention the countless contracts that must be maintained. Or were you attempting to make a play for office yourself, William?”

My eyes are fire as they lift to my uncle’s; he’s never made any indication that he wanted the throne for himself, to take the seat that my father occupied. I thought that was why he was choosing to symbolically sit in the chair he chose.

“What? Stephan, I have no interest in being head of family.”

I stand, moving around the side of the desk to my father’s chair, hating that this will be where I sit now. It’s a job that I know I can do, and I know I can do it well. I’ve always been a natural leader…but I wasn’t ready to lose my father quite so soon. I pull the chair out and move in front of it, but I don’t sit. “Good. Then I’m going to need his medical reports, the life insurance policies, and his itinerary for the week.” Mentally, I’ve already started pushing aside all of my personal contracts and business happenings of my own companies because I know that I’m going to be needed here.

“That’s the other thing, Stephan; my son has expressed to myself and some others that he is intending to place his bid for head of the family.”

“Elijah?” I laugh incredulously. “His claim is shaky at best. He was my father. Elijah would be a reckless choice.”

My personal history with Elijah is shaky at best. I know him better than anybody else has managed to in his life, I’m fairly certain, and I know for a fact that he’s the last person I want in charge of this family. He’s hot-headed, temperamental, and far too impulsive. Despite the fact that he’s thirty-three, and three years older than myself, he’s about half as mature as I’ve ever been. Always the type to jump first and think about the consequences after the fact. There was no shoot first, ask questions later—there was only ever just shooting.

“He says that since he’s the oldest heir that his claim is as solid as yours to the throne and that he will not be turned aside. Believe me, Stephan, I’ve tried to talk him out of this. That’s why we had delays in funeral arrangements as well as getting you back here into the mansion for talks…he’s already attempting to make moves.”

“Well, I’ll just have to nip that in the bud, won’t I?”

“I sure hope that you’re going to have a lot more luck than I’ve had. The boy never listened to me before, and I doubt that he’s going to start doing so now. Elijah’s always been a greedy little shit; there’s no denying that.” William says, not hiding the fact that he and his son rarely have ever seen eye to eye and clearly not on this issue either. “He’s not somebody you can trust, Stephan; you know that.”

“Right,” I agree. “So what’s the question then? Just ignore him.”

“It’s not that easy, I’m afraid. It seems that some people have actually started to support his claims. The cousins are on the verge of being threatened into an agreement; his tongue is as silver as ever.”

“People do love his particular breed of chaos.”

“You just need to cement your claim, Stephan. Then all of this will be over, and we can get right back to business as usual.”

There will never be business as usual again, not without my father. I’m not sure that I’m going to be okay with this particular brand of new normal, but I say nothing. Instead, I make a gesture for him to continue speaking; if he has a suggestion then I want him to get it out into the open so that I can move forward. There’s so much to do, and I cannot risk being idle. If I don’t start on what needs to be done, and right away, then there’s a small chance that I won’t be able to start at all.

Despite what my reputation might claim about me, I am very capable of having emotions. I know all too well that people call me cold, heartless, ruthless, downright evil behind my back. That’s exactly what I’ve always needed them to call me; it’s a part that I play very well. That was one thing that I learned from my father very early on in life: that in this game, you only get anywhere by your reputation, and men looked up to men they could fear and see as a leader at the same time. I’ve always embodied that publicly to every person I’ve met.

Personal feelings are for private, another gem of knowledge that my father lived by.

Lived.

The knot in my throat grows, and, like all the rest, I force it lower, mind over matter as I look to William, waiting for his answer.

“The simplest way to strengthen your claim is a unified family front, which means that you need to find a wife.”

“A wife?!” I echo.

“Yes. Preferably from a high-born mafia family and as soon as you can before my son catches wise to that same idea and makes his moves.”

The idea of Elijah with a wife is impossible. I can’t imagine the sort of woman that might agree to such a union and least of all by choice. Not because he’s considered ugly or because he’s not without a certain charm, but I don’t think there’s ever been a woman capable of sticking around him for that long. Elijah is a powerful man, and despite all of the rest of it, I do consider him a friend, not just family. Elijah’s priority will always be serving the family, the Lord family, not a wife; she would only get in his way.

“One does not just pluck a wife out of thin air, William, and a high-born mafia daughter at that? They aren’t the sort that can be bought in the first place.”

“I have a few trusted men compiling a list of currently single women that might be suitable to you for your consideration, and whoever you choose, we will fly her right out here and make her an offer that she simply cannot refuse.”

“I see. You’ve just thought of everything, haven’t you William?”

“Son, I know that it’s not ideal, and I know it’s sudden and rather eliminates the whole love side of things out of the picture. But this is hardly uncommon; it’s been done for political power and influence for generations.”

“You do not need to lecture me about our family history, William; I know it just as well as you. Just because I’ve chosen to spend my time pursuing my own business ventures over these last few years doesn’t mean that I’ve been out of the loop here.”

“Of course not, and I would expect nothing less from you. Just like your father, always able to see everything at the same time and three steps ahead of the rest of us.”

I should have seen the wife aspect coming. Really, it’s such an obvious solution but one I’ve had little to no interest in finding for myself. I’ve been busy expanding our capital, our influence, and business range…and in truth, I’ve been indulging myself as I wanted. What I never would have seen coming is that, the moment that William suggested it, one name came to mind. The only daughter of the nearest mafia family…and a woman who has sworn to hate me for all time.

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