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

One corner of his mouth twitched. “You have spirit. Good. You’ll need it.”

He leaned back.

“The offer is simple. You move into the estate in Lake Forest. You go where Sienna goes. You keep her out of jail, out of the tabloids, and preferably out of a coffin. In return, you get room, board, protection, and five thousand dollars a week.”

The number was obscene. It was rent, food, breathing room, and the miracle of not waking up every day with panic already waiting at the foot of the bed.

Casey should have said no.

Instead she heard herself ask, “What’s the catch?”

Dante stood, walked around the desk, and stopped close enough for her to catch the clean scent of cedar and the metallic note of cold night air. He was using his height now, not crudely, but with the easy instinct of a man who understood that intimidation saved time.

“The catch,” he said softly, “is that if you betray us, if you sell stories, if you help her self-destruct, or if you try to disappear, I will find you.”

His eyes did not waver.

“And I will make you wish you had been poor forever.”

Casey held his gaze longer than was wise. “That was almost poetic.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

She glanced down at the check again. It looked unreal. Like stage money. Like the answer to a prayer from the wrong god.

By midnight, she was in the back of a black SUV heading north.

The Morelli estate looked less like a home than a private kingdom that distrusted heaven and had prepared accordingly. Iron gates, stone walls, cameras, armed guards, long driveways lined with bare winter trees. The mansion itself sat enormous and pale under the moon, all columns and windows and old-money menace.

Inside, Salvatore Morelli waited at the foot of the grand staircase.

He was older than Casey expected, his silver hair neatly combed, his body slightly bent over a cane, but the air around him was sharp enough to cut paper. He did not radiate noise the way Sienna did. He radiated stillness, the kind that made everybody else talk too much.

“This is the girl?” he asked.

Dante nodded. “This is Casey Rhodes.”

Salvatore looked her over the way a general might inspect a rifle. “She looks tired.”

“I am tired,” Casey said.

For the first time, something faintly amused moved through the old man’s face. “Good. People who are tired have no patience for nonsense.”

He turned toward the French doors at the back of the hall. “My daughter is in the pool house. She’s breaking furniture.”