Chapter 2

Mia kept asking questions, and in the end, I gave in.

I sat down by the counter and told her everything.

The Dante I knew wasn’t born a mafia king.

He wasn’t born feared, powerful, untouchable.

When I first met him, he was just a quiet, strange little boy nobody wanted.

He had no friends.

No real family.

His parents were going through a vicious divorce, and neither of them wanted custody.

They passed him back and forth like he was a burden neither one of them could afford to keep.

Winter in South Brooklyn cut like broken glass.

That year was especially brutal.

Dante was eight years old, wearing nothing but a thin sweater, curled up in the apartment stairwell, shivering so hard his teeth wouldn’t stop chattering.

I saw him, and I brought him home.

Everything changed after that.

My father wasn’t in the mob, but he had deep connections with old neighborhood crews and knew exactly how the world worked.

He also knew how to spot something rare.

One night, while playing cards with Dante and trying to distract him, my father realized the kid had a terrifying brain.

He could do mental math faster than grown men using calculators.

He spotted patterns before anyone else did.

He could memorize ledgers, routes, faces, shipments.

Once my father understood what Dante was capable of, he stopped treating him like some abandoned street kid.

He started seeing him as someone who could rule.

From then on, Dante changed fast.

By ten, he was helping older men count money and catch fake books.

By fourteen, he could negotiate territory better than men three times his age.

By sixteen, he had already become someone people looked at differently.

Someone dangerous.

Someone rising.

And once the parents who had thrown him away realized what he was becoming, they suddenly wanted him back.

Both of them.

They fought over him like starving dogs fighting over meat.

Dante didn’t go with either one of them.

Instead, he knelt in front of my father and lowered his head.

“I know the difference,” he said, “between who was good to me and who actually loved me.”

“From now on, you and Elena’s mother are my real family.”

“And I’ll take care of Elena for the rest of my life.”

He kept that promise for a very, very long time.

Dante kept climbing higher, but he never left me behind.

When he got pulled deeper into family business, he made sure there was always a place for me in every property under his name.

When he started taking power, he made sure nobody in the city dared disrespect me.

When people looked down on me for being too ordinary, too soft, too small for his world, he would wrap an arm around my waist and tell them—

“She stays with me. Always.”

I used to worry that I couldn’t keep up with him.

Dante was made for violence, strategy, power.

I was just Elena.

A girl from a tiny breakfast shop.

A girl who didn’t belong in silk gowns, private clubs, and blood-soaked loyalty oaths.

But Dante once looked me straight in the eye and said,

“When I was eight, my parents threw me away and walked off.”

“I sat in that stairwell all night.”

“You were the one who opened the door.”

“From that day on, I swore I’d never leave you.”

“Elena, there is no Dante Caruso without you.”

“No matter how high I rise, I will never throw you away.”

That was the kind of man he was.

Obsessive.

Extreme.

Once he decided something was his, he never let go.

That was true when he built power.

It was true when he chased me.

And it was still true when he betrayed me.

“Betrayed?” Mia’s mouth fell open. She looked genuinely angry for me.

“Wait. You two grew up together. You practically held each other up. And he still cheated on you?”

“With who? Some mob princess? Some senator’s daughter? Some gorgeous snake in designer heels?”

I shook my head.

“None of those.”

“The woman Dante cheated with…”

“…was a flower girl.”

Mia blinked.

“What?”

I lowered my eyes to the box in front of me and said quietly,

“A skinny, plain-looking flower girl.”

By twenty-seven, Dante was already one of the most feared men on the East Coast.

He had money.

Power.

Reputation.

Enough of all three to last ten lifetimes.

By then, he didn’t care about the usual rich-man hobbies.

He had no interest in yachts, luxury watches, or racehorses.

For some reason, he became obsessed with flowers.

Imported ones. Rare ones. Cheap ones. Wild ones.

If it bloomed, he wanted it.

He filled our estate with them.

But his favorite was always irises.

Because one year, on his birthday, I gave him a potted iris.

He stared at it for a long time and then said,

“This flower started all of it.”

“This tiny thing. It begins as almost nothing. Then, with enough control, enough care, enough interference… it becomes something beautiful.”

He smiled a little, like he was talking to himself.

“The process is fascinating.”

He said he liked flowers.

But what he really liked was watching things change in his hands.

He liked control.

He liked shaping something fragile into something that needed him to survive.

I never really understood what he meant.

To me, a flower was just a flower.

It bloomed when it wanted to bloom.

It died when it had to die.

Why make it so complicated?

But Nora understood him instantly.

That day, she was helping a gardener move flower pots. Her hands were covered in dirt, cheap clothes hanging loose on her thin frame, skin darkened by the sun.

The second she heard Dante speak, she looked up like she had found religion.

“Mr. Caruso is right,” she said. “I like that feeling too.”

“Whether a flower grows well or badly depends on the person raising it.”

Then she gently touched an iris petal and smiled.

“Look how beautiful this one turned out. I took care of it myself.”

That autumn, beneath a yard full of blooming irises, they met.

Because of flowers.

And because of me.