Part 2: A powerful mafia boss woke up to a little girl saving his life with his inhaler, completely unaware that her presence exposed a secret buried with his dead wife.

The most feared mafia boss on the East Coast woke up to find a tiny girl in pink pajamas kneeling beside him, her cheeks wet with tears and his life-saving inhaler clutched in her hands, but when Lucas Moretti learned that her mother had secretly brought her into the mansion, he ordered his guards to find the woman immediately—because the little girl had just mentioned a name that should have been buried with his dead wife...

“Mister, are you sick like me, too?”

The tiny voice echoed down the marble hallway of the most feared mansion in New York.

Six-year-old Lily Carter stood barefoot over the body of Lucas Moretti, a man whose name made grown men whisper behind locked doors.

He was sprawled on the white stone floor in a black suit, his lips turning purple, his powerful chest barely moving, his own inhaler lying just out of reach.

And in Lily’s small shaking hand was her child-sized asthma inhaler.

She was not supposed to be there.

No child was supposed to be inside the Moretti mansion.

Especially not the daughter of a poor housekeeper who had smuggled her in because she had no babysitter, no money, and no one left to call.

But Lily did not know all that.

She only knew the man on the floor looked the way she felt when her own lungs closed.

So she knelt beside him, pressed the inhaler between his cold lips, and whispered, “Please don’t die, mister.”

Once.

Nothing.

Twice.

Still nothing.

Her bottom lip trembled.

Then she pressed a third time.

Lucas Moretti’s chest suddenly rose.

A deep, ragged breath dragged itself into his lungs.

Then another.

Color crept back into his ghost-pale face.

His eyelids fluttered open, revealing cold gray-blue eyes that had stared down killers, senators, and enemies of the state.

But now those eyes were blinking up at a tiny girl with tears on her cheeks.

“Who are you?” he rasped.

Lily sniffled, clutching the inhaler to her chest.

“I’m Lily,” she whispered. “I thought you were dead.”

In that impossible moment, the most feared mafia boss on the East Coast realized a six-year-old girl in pink pajamas had just pulled him back from the grave.

And he had no idea she had also ruined the plan of the man standing closest to him.

Three years earlier, Lucas Moretti had not been a man who collapsed in hallways.

He was the man other men collapsed in front of.

The Moretti family had ruled the East Coast underworld for nearly a century, from the docks of Brooklyn to the warehouses of New Jersey. Their name was stitched into the shadows of the city. His grandfather built the empire with iron and blood. His father expanded it with cruelty people still discussed in lowered voices.

When Lucas inherited the throne at thirty-two, the old captains expected him to become the same kind of monster.

But Lucas was different.

He had read books his father never touched.

He had studied law, finance, business, and strategy.

And above all, he had fallen in love with a woman who saw him as something more than a name sharpened into a weapon.

Her name was Isabella.

She was a piano teacher from Queens, with soft brown curls and a laugh that sounded like the first chord of a forgotten song. Lucas met her by accident at a charity gala where she had been hired to play.

He stood in the back of the ballroom in a black tuxedo, watching her fingers move across the keys, and for the first time in his life, he forgot what empire he was supposed to inherit.

She did not know who he was.

That was exactly why he loved her.

They married quietly.

A year later, their son Daniel arrived, a bright-eyed little boy who tugged at his father’s silk ties with chocolate-smeared fingers.

For the first time, the Moretti mansion had music in it.

Isabella played in the sunroom every morning. Daniel chased imaginary dragons through the marble halls. Lucas Moretti, feared heir to a bloodstained family, sat on the floor building Lego towers with his five-year-old son.

One quiet evening, with Daniel asleep on his chest, Lucas whispered to Isabella across the couch.

“I’m going to wash my hands of this life, Bella. I mean it. Real estate, restaurants, something clean. I want a normal life for him.”

Isabella smiled.

“I don’t need normal, Lucas. I just need you to come home every night.”

But fate had been listening.

It happened on a rainy night in March.

Lucas was in his study when Victor Romano burst through the door.

Victor was his most trusted lieutenant.

His right hand.