Chapter 2
Bianca froze, the blood draining from her lips until her ruby lipstick looked like an open wound.
On the floor, Bastian groaned, spitting crimson onto his white silk pocket square as he pushed himself up against the wreckage of shattered gift boxes. “You can’t do that, Alaric! We signed the charter! The Coletti-Montesi merger stipulates that my firstborn son inherits the eastern shipping docks and the port authority!”
“The charter stipulates an heir born of lawful wedlock,” Alaric said, his hands slipping casually into his trouser pockets, the heavy gold signet ring catching the light. “You brought a stray into my house, Bastian. You brought a parasite to my daughter’s celebration and laid your hands on my blood.”
“She isn’t a stray!” Bastian snarled, struggling to his feet and wiping his bloody mouth. “Faye is carrying the future! You’ve run this syndicate for thirty years without a boy to carry the name! Look at Serena—she’s weak! She was in bed for three months just keeping that fetus alive!”
Serena’s fingers tightened on the velvet armrests. The humiliation that had burned through her only moments ago began to cool into something far more dangerous. She looked at the man she had loved for seven years, the man who had whispered vows into her hair while slipping behind her back into hotel suites with a twenty-six-year-old socialite.
“Is that what you told yourself while you spent my trust fund on her penthouse?” Serena’s voice was steady now, cutting through the murmurs of the sixty capos and relatives sitting along the mahogany table.
Bastian glared at her. “I did what was necessary for the lineage, Serena! A daughter cannot command five thousand men on the waterfront! A daughter cannot sit at the Commission table!”
“And you think a bastard born in sin can?” Alaric took a slow step forward. Every capo in the room leaned away from his shadow. “You think these men follow blood alone? They follow strength. And right now, Bastian, you look like a dog begging for scraps among wrapping paper.”
Bianca grabbed her son’s arm, pulling him upright. Her chin quivered with outrage. “Don’t listen to him, Bastian. We hold forty percent of the voting shares in Montesi Logistics. My brother controls the union delegates in Jersey. If Alaric cuts you out, we pull the labor force tomorrow. Your ships will rot at the docks, old man!”
Alaric looked at Bianca with faint amusement, the look a wolf gives a terrier barking through a locked fence. “Call your brother, Bianca.”
Bianca frowned, her grip tightening on Bastian’s sleeve. “What?”
“I said, call him,” Alaric repeated quietly. “Ask him why his phone has been switched off since three this afternoon. Ask him why his private hangar in Teterboro is currently surrounded by federal marshals and three squads of my personal detail.”
Bastian’s head snapped toward his mother. “What is he talking about? Ma, what did you do?”
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“He’s bluffing!” Bianca shrieked, though her fingers trembled as she fumbled inside her designer clutch for her phone. “He’s bluffing, Bastian! He’s trying to terrify you!”
“I don’t bluff in my own dining room,” Alaric murmured. “Serena, my sweet, take your water. Your pulse is running too high.”
