CHAPTER ONE

      THE HIDEOUS MANSION was just as he’d recalled in his nightmares, the gaudy orange exterior clashing wildly with the massive blue shutters. The only thing that didn’t quite gel with the picture before him was the blaze of the sun glinting off the grotesquely opulent marble statues guarding the entry gates.

      Romeo Brunetti’s last memory of this place had been in the chilling rain, his threadbare clothes sticking to his skin as he’d huddled in the bushes outside the gates. A part of him had prayed he wouldn’t be discovered, the other more than a tiny bit hopeful that discovery would mean the end to all the suffering, the hunger, the harrowing pain of rejection that ate his thirteen-year-old body alive from morning to night. Back then he would’ve welcomed the beating his reluctant rescuer had received for daring to return Romeo to this place. Because the beating would have ended in oblivion, and the bitterness coursing through his veins like acid would have been no more.

      Unfortunately, the fates had decreed otherwise. He’d hidden in the bushes, cold and near catatonic, until the ever-present hunger had forced him to move.

      Romeo stared up at the spears clutched in the hands of the statues, recalling his father’s loud-bellied boast of them being made of solid gold.

      The man who’d called him a bastard and a waste of space to his face. Right before he’d instructed his minion to throw him out and make sure he never returned. That he didn’t care whether the spawn of the whore he’d rutted with in an alleyway in Palermo lived or died, as long as he, Agostino Fattore, the head of the ruling crime family, didn’t have