Chapter 2 - The Iron Gates
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At a twenty-four-hour diner in Queens, Norah ordered a black coffee and opened her laptop. The neon sign buzzed ominously against the rain-slicked window, casting a red glow over her screen.
First, she created a survival budget. It was devastatingly short.
Then, she opened the document she had avoided looking at for three long years. Her résumé.
Securities Operations Analyst.
Reconciliation Controls.
Internal Risk Review.
The bold words looked as though they belonged to an entirely different woman. A woman who was sharp, fearless, and respected.
Her former coworker Maya answered her text message within six minutes.
You were excellent at this. A résumé gap doesn’t rewrite your history or your brain.
Three job links immediately followed. But corporate jobs required rounds of interviews, background checks, and time. Housing required a solution tonight.
As she scrolled through the depths of an obscure local job board, Norah found a strange, buried advertisement.
Live-in family position. Room and board included. Immediate start. Discretion essential.
There was no company name. There was no friendly photograph of a smiling family. Just a burner phone number and an address located in a highly exclusive, heavily wooded zip code north of the city.
She dialed the number. A gruff voice gave her a gate code and hung up.
One hour later, Norah stood outside massive, imposing iron gates guarded by two men wearing dark suits and visible shoulder holsters. She wondered, as the freezing rain soaked through her coat, whether sudden poverty had finally made her reckless enough to get herself killed.
The taller guard checked her ID against a clipboard, looking at her soft curves and soaked hair with blatant suspicion, before pressing a button. The iron gates swung open with a heavy mechanical groan.
Inside the sprawling stone estate, Norah expected a formal interview with a stuffy estate manager. She expected to be grilled on her childcare philosophies and housekeeping skills.
Instead, she was escorted into a massive, echoing dining room where she found a five-year-old boy hiding beneath a mahogany table, absolutely refusing to eat.
At the absolute head of the table sat Luca Castellano.
May you like
He had silver-white hair at the temples despite looking no older than thirty-five. He wore a crisp black dress shirt, unbuttoned at the collar. His steel-gray eyes were fixed on the tablecloth. He was the man the city’s newspapers rarely mentioned without pairing his name with words like crime, shipping, syndicate, or godfather.
Three untouched, expensive plates of food sat completely ignored before the empty chair next to him.
