Sneak Peak
The war had been bloody. Ricci’s men had done what Ricci Dominion always did—burned, gunned down, erased. An ally-turned-rival bloodline, Giovanni, fell that night, their screams swallowed by the smoke of vengeance. When the guns went silent, only one sound remained.
A cry. Thin, reedy, trembling against the silence of death.
Carlo Ricci was only twenty at the time, already shouldering the weight of his family’s empire. His hands were still slick with the echoes of battle when his men dragged him to a shattered bedroom, the walls splattered with the proof of what they had done.
There, amidst the ruin, stood a stroller. Inside it—a toddler girl.
She was no more than three years old, wide-eyed from crying, hair curling damp against her forehead. Her tiny fists clutched at the air as though reaching for ghosts who would never return. Everyone else—parents, uncles, cousins—had been wiped out by Ricci’s steel-like vengeance and Ricci’s blood.
Carlo’s lieutenant muttered, “Boss, we should end it. No witnesses.”
The young Ricci prince stared down at the child, and something in him cracked. She was trembling, broken, but alive. Her lips quivered as if she were too small even to know grief, and yet somehow she bore the whole weight of it.
“Leave her,” the cold voice of Carlo echoed.
Another man growled. “She’s nothing, boss. She’ll grow to hate you. She’s a Giovanni.”
Carlo lowered himself slowly until his shadow stretched over the stroller. The child stilled when she saw him. Her eyes, dark as midnight, latched onto his face as if searching for an anchor in the wreckage.
And then, impossibly, she stopped crying.
His chest tightened. For a man raised in violence, taught to kill without hesitation, he had never known the weight of innocence until that moment. He reached out, his gloved finger brushing her cheek. She caught it in her tiny hand, gripping it with a strength that startled him.
“You’ve lost everything,” he murmured, the words tasting foreign on his tongue. “And I… I gave you nothing but ashes, little Giovanni princess.”
She didn’t understand. She couldn’t. Yet her eyes did not waver.
Carlo Ricci, the rising prince of shadows, had no right to feel tethered to her. But tethered he was. Some instinct older than blood and sharper than fate whispered in his bones: This one is yours to carry.
He straightened, his voice flat, commanding. “She lives.”
His men exchanged uneasy looks, but none dared defy him.
That night, the orphaned child slept in a stroller in silk sheets and arrived at Ricci Manor. Carlo stood at the foot of her stroller long after the household had gone quiet, watching her small chest rise and fall.
He told himself it was guilt. That he owed her a life since his hands had stolen the rest. Her uncle, Ricky Giovanni, had done something treacherous by allying with the rivals. This made the long-term ally, Giovanni’s turn into an enemy of Ricci’s. But deep down, he felt something else—something heavier. For this orphaned girl.
