No One Could Handle the Mafia Boss’s Daughter — Until a Poor Waitress Did the Impossible. Everyone around held their breath in anticipation.

“Not tonight,” Casey muttered.

She picked up the ashtray, set the table right, and went back downstairs.

Ten minutes later, her manager tapped her arm with fingers that looked boneless.

“There’s a man in the office,” he whispered.

Casey untied her apron. “Am I fired?”

“I don’t know.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “It’s Dante Valenti.”

That name hit harder than the exploding bottle.

Everybody in Chicago knew Dante Valenti. Salvatore Morelli’s enforcer. The man who handled problems too ugly, too delicate, or too final for anybody else. Stories about him drifted through kitchens, bars, and backrooms like urban legends wearing expensive shoes. He was said to be as cold as a lake in January and twice as deep.

Casey went to the office because there was nothing else to do.

Dante sat behind the manager’s desk as if the room belonged to him and had always belonged to him. He was in his early thirties, dark-haired, broad-shouldered, wearing a charcoal suit so precisely tailored it made everyone else’s clothes look accidental. A thin scar cut through one eyebrow, giving his face the kind of asymmetry that only made it more dangerous. He was not handsome in a gentle way. He looked like a man carved with a knife and then taught to smile as a threat.

“Sit down, Miss Rhodes,” he said.

She sat.

He turned a tablet toward her. Security footage from the mezzanine played in crisp silence, stopping at the exact frame where she stood with the water pitcher in hand, staring down Sienna Morelli as if she were nothing more than an overgrown brat in borrowed diamonds.

Dante folded his hands. “My men can’t manage her. Her father can’t manage her. Three therapists have failed, and one moved to Arizona out of what I assume was spiritual exhaustion. Yet you got her to stand down in under a minute.”

Casey tried to swallow but found her mouth dry. “I was just doing my job.”

He studied her as if the sentence itself were suspicious. “How much do you make here?”

She named the number.

He didn’t blink. He reached into his jacket, took out a checkbook, and wrote with an old-fashioned fountain pen. Then he tore off the check and placed it in front of her.

Casey looked down.

Ten thousand dollars.

Her lungs forgot how to work.

“What is this?”

“A signing bonus,” Dante said.

“For what?”

“For a job with the Morelli family.”

Casey looked up slowly. “That sounds like something a person says right before they’re human trafficked.”