“Please Don’t Trust That Woman,” the Maid’s Toddler Whispered—The Mafia Boss Slowly Looked at His Fiancée
A work of fiction. The characters and events are invented; any resemblance to real people is coincidental.
Sixty guests. A string quartet playing Vivaldi. Imported white roses and crisp lake air. Alessandro Rienzi’s engagement gala is flawless, right up until a three-year-old tugs his sleeve.
“Please don’t trust that woman.”
Amara is the maid’s daughter. She carries a gray stuffed lamb by one battered ear, and she barely understands the sentence she just said.
But she knows what she heard. “She said when wedding happens, everything changes.” And she knows what the woman’s face did the moment it caught her listening. “Fake.”
Across the ballroom, Genevieve Ashworth lifts her champagne flute and smiles at him. Sixteen months of sunlit warmth. A diamond-clad hand resting on her hip. The perfect fiancée.
Alessandro does not smile back.
His father once buried three loyal men because he mistook their silence for deceit. Alessandro has spent six years making sure he would never become that man. Now a child is pointing across his own ballroom, and he has to decide what a whisper is worth.
Before the party ends, he makes one call. The woman he is about to marry keeps a second phone in her evening clutch. He wants to know who she has been talking to.