He's her enemy. Her obsession. And the only man who has the power to destroy her.
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My name is Frank Monroe, and I am the most dangerous woman in Chicago. Not because I kill, but because I make it legal. I'm the lawyer the Irish mob calls when...
"May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't."
- George Patton
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My world as I knew it shattered. The axis on which my entire reality spun snapped clean in two.
For a single, suspended second, I was convinced my own mind had betrayed me. That the cocktail of painkillers and pure, undiluted fury had concocted a hallucination, twisting his words into something so profoundly impossible it was laughable.
But the silence told me otherwise.
It was a thick, suffocating blanket thrown over the room. Every breath was held. Every pair of eyes—Papa's wide with a dawning horror, Salvatore's with a pitying solemnity, Sawyer's with a gut-wrenching understanding—was locked on me. On us.
And Don Sergio Lombardi stood there, an obelisk of a man, his very presence consuming all the oxygen. At seventy, he didn't just have power—he was power, distilled into human form. His eyes, those cold, calculating chips of glacial ice, held me pinned, daring me to refute the tectonic truth he had just unleashed.
"What did you just say?" The words were scraped raw from my throat, stripped of everything but a fragile, bleeding disbelief.
He took a single, deliberate step closer. The space between us crackled. "You heard me, Francesca."
My breath hitched, a trapped, useless thing in my frozen lungs.
"That's bullshit." It was a snarl, but it sounded feeble, like throwing a pebble at a fortress wall.
He reached for me then, his hand -- the one with the bruised, bloody knuckles -- extending as if to offer comfort. As if I were some stray puppy he could soothe with a pat on the head. I recoiled violently, every instinct screaming in rejection of this paternal pantomime.
"You are my granddaughter, Francesca," he said, his voice adopting a softer, gravelly tone, laden with a grief that felt like a performance. "You're Gino's daughter. My own flesh and blood."
The words were a physical blow, a sledgehammer to my sternum. My blood turned to ice water. My hands curled into fists so tight my nails bit half-moons into my palms. No.
"My father is John Hansley," I bit out, each syllable a weapon, a desperate incantation to make the foundational truth of my life real again.
If this was true, then my father, the man who taught me to ride a bike, who sang off-key in the kitchen, was a phantom. Our entire life, a beautiful, elaborate lie.
Then Salvatore spoke, his voice a quieter, gentler.
"No, cara," he said, and the gentle condescension in that term of endearment made me want to put my fist through the wall. "Your father's real name is Giovanni Lombardi. My little brother."
Giovanni Lombardi.
The name was a bullet, tumbling end over end, tearing through the fabric of my memory before lodging itself in the core of who I was. My mind went white, then erupted in a chaotic scramble for footing.
