Chapter 1 - The Broken Glass
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At exactly 12:17 a.m., Mia Carter heard a glass strike the floor upstairs.
The sound echoed through the sprawling, cavernous hallways of the Moretti mansion like a gunshot in a cathedral. Mia froze halfway down the dark corridor, her hand pausing on the polished mahogany banister. The estate was completely silent. Everyone else had already gone to bed hours ago. The security team was patrolling the outer perimeter, and the rest of the domestic staff had retreated to their quarters in the west wing.
Luca Moretti, the head of the family and the most feared man in the city, was still at the harbor handling syndicate business. His younger sister, Sofia, was supposed to be sleeping under strict orders from her private doctor. There was absolutely no reason for anything to be breaking in her room at this hour.
Then, cutting through the heavy silence of the house, Mia heard a frightened voice trembling from behind Sofia’s closed bedroom door.
“No… please…”
Mia’s heart stopped dead in her chest. Sofia rarely raised her voice anymore. In fact, she hardly spoke at all. Six months earlier, a terrible, violent car accident had left the twenty-two-year-old unable to move her legs. Since that horrific night, she had spent most of her days trapped in her bed or confined to a custom wheelchair, entirely dependent on others for nearly everything.
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Mia dropped her cleaning supplies and hurried toward the room, her soft-soled shoes making no sound against the marble floor. As she approached, she saw that the heavy oak door was partly open, a sliver of warm yellow light spilling out into the dark hallway.
What she saw inside made her grip the wooden doorframe so hard her knuckles turned white. Vanessa DeLuca—Luca Moretti’s incredibly beautiful and equally terrifying fiancée—was leaning menacingly over Sofia’s bed. She was still wearing a dark red evening gown from a charity gala earlier that night. One hand was gripping Sofia firmly beneath the jaw, pinning her head against the pillows. The other hand held a small, unfamiliar brown medicine bottle suspended just above her trembling lips.
