The Don's Lost Daughter

After my husband seized the Ferrante territory through a contested succession clause, he took his dead brother's widow and her two children to the city to build a new life.

My daughter and I survived on whatever I could scrounge from corner markets and church pantries, waiting for him in that freezing tenement on the wrong side of the waterfront for five long years.

The only news that ever came was that he'd been ratified by the Commission as head of the Ferrante family.

I carried my daughter across three state lines to find him, and the soldiers at the compound gate beat us with their fists like we were strays wandering onto sacred ground.

"Showing up at the Boss's compound claiming to be family? You must be tired of living. Don't you know how our Lady deals with hussies who come sniffing around?"

I lay in a heap of my own blood. "...Lady?"

When I lifted my head, I could just make out Gianna Greco in the distance, dressed like a Donna, her two children raised as the young prince and princess of the household.

Gianna greeted us with a warm smile and set out a plate of cannoli. They were laced with poison.

My daughter was starving. She wolfed down a piece and dropped dead on the spot.

I choked up a mouthful of black blood. As the world dimmed, I heard Gianna's vicious laugh cutting through the haze.

"Serafina Castellano, you should never have come here to disrupt our household. Dante has treated me as his wife for years. If you showed up alive, how was I supposed to go on being the Lady of this house?!"

My daughter and I died like dogs. They rolled our bodies in old carpet and dumped us in an unmarked lot past the rail yards.

After I was gone, Dante wrapped his arms around a weeping Gianna and murmured comfort against her hair.

"She's dead. Let it go. Even if she'd lived, I would've had the annulment papers drawn up and told her to stay away from our family."

The meal I'd once given a starving stranger, the vows he'd sworn on his mother's grave, all of it erased from his memory as though it had never existed.

I died with hatred lodged so deep it followed me into the dark. When my eyes opened again, it was the very day Dante took control of the Ferrante territory.

I threw the wilted greens from my hands, sold the tenement for every dollar it was worth, and carried my daughter to my father's compound, where I fell to my knees.

"Father. I've decided to annul my marriage."

...

In my previous life, the moment I heard Dante had been made Boss of the Ferrante family, I bundled up my daughter and traveled across three state lines to find him. Gianna killed us both with poisoned cannoli.

My last thought before the darkness took me was regret. Not for dying, but for severing ties with my father, Don Enzo Castellano, all for the sake of marrying Dante Ferrante.

This time, the moment I opened my eyes, I sold the tenement, packed what little money it brought, and set out for the city.

But I was not going to the Ferrante compound.

I told the driver to take the long way around, and the car rolled to a stop before the iron gates of the Castellano estate.

The driver took one look at us, my daughter and me in our threadbare clothes, shuffling toward the Don's gates like a pair of beggars, and let out a snort.

"Takes all kinds. Now even beggars have the nerve to show up at the Don's door claiming to be family."

I ignored him. I took Valentina's small hand in mine, walked to the gate, and knelt.

"Father. Your daughter knows she was wrong."

My father was Don Enzo Castellano, Boss of the oldest and most feared syndicate on the Eastern Seaboard. My mother had been a Montecalvo from the old Sicilian families.

I was born the heir to the Castellano name, raised behind compound walls where men kissed my father's ring before they spoke. Then one autumn, during a drive through the warehouse district near the waterfront, I stumbled upon Dante Ferrante, the castoff second son of the Ferrante family.

His brothers had been tearing each other apart over the family's territory, and he'd nearly been killed in the crossfire. They broke his leg and left him bleeding in a back alley.

I felt sorry for him. So I saved his life.

Then, sharing those long days in a safe house while his bones healed, I fell in love with him.

When I swore I would marry Dante and no one else, my father was furious. His voice went cold as iron.

"If you marry that man, I no longer have a daughter."

Dante swore on his mother's grave he would cherish me for the rest of his life.

I stripped off my silk, left my father's ring on the kitchen table, put on a plain cotton dress, and became his wife.

And over the years, lulled by his sweet words repeated day after day, I withered into a gaunt, hollow-eyed woman in a waterfront tenement, jumping at sirens in the night.

I never imagined that within five or six years, every one of his elder brothers would die in turf wars and Commission purges, and the Ferrante family's contested succession clause would hand Dante the territory on a single condition: claim the dual-bloodline right, and the family was his.

Once the Commission ratified him, he simply slotted Gianna into the role of his wife and raised her children as his own.

By the time I dragged myself to his door, Dante had long since forgotten that my daughter and I existed.