On the drive to the Academy, I sent a message to the Family's legal fixers. My thumb moved across the screen with the kind of calm that only comes after something inside you has already broken and rebuilt itself in the space of a breath.
[Prepare a dissolution agreement per the blood contract. I want Davide Ferraro out with nothing. Not a dollar. Not a territory. Not a name anyone will answer to.]
[My daughter was assaulted at the Academy. Bring a full team. I want them to pay dearly.]
[How dare a freeloader like Davide keep a comare and a bastard son on the side while living off Valente blood money.]
The consigliere's reply came in four seconds: [Understood, Donna. We're moving.]
They called me Donna. Because that's what I was. What I'd always been. The sole heir to the Valente Syndicate, the most powerful crime family on the Eastern Seaboard. I'd hidden it. Lived quietly. Trusted the wrong man with a piece of what my mother had built. And now my daughter had puncture wounds on her body because of it.
My thumb found my mother's signet ring and traced the crest slowly, deliberately, the way you run your hand along the edge of a blade before you use it.