Part 2: Hours before proposing to another woman, a mob boss walked into a restaurant restroom and found four six-year-old boys who shared his exact face.

The rain hit Clara's beat-up silver Honda Civic like gravel against tin. Through the rain-streaked windshield of my armored Cadillac Escalade, I watched her struggle to buckle all four boys into their booster seats in the cramped back row.

She was panicking. Her hands shook so violently she dropped her keys onto the wet asphalt. She knelt to pick them up, rain plastering her hair to her cheeks, soaking through her threadbare coat.

My chest seized with an agony I had never known existed.

"Boss," Marcus said from the front passenger seat, turning around with a burner tablet in his hand. "Your uncle Salvatore called twice. Sloane’s father just threatened to pull the harbor zoning permits if you don't show up in twenty minutes. If this alliance blows up tonight, the Harringtons will sign with the southern syndicates by dawn. It’s war, Dom."

"Let it burn," I whispered.

Marcus stared at me, his weathered jaw dropping. "Dominic... that's thirty million dollars and half the North End ports."

"Look at the car in front of us, Marcus," I said, my voice dangerously quiet. "Look at the children in the back."

Marcus raised his binoculars, squinting through the downpour at the Honda's rear window. Two of the boys were pressing their faces against the glass, making funny faces at the rain.

Marcus lowered the glasses. His face went gray. He had served my father for twenty-five years. He had held me as an infant when my mother died of leukemia.

"Sweet Jesus Mary and Joseph," Marcus muttered, crossing himself. "They’re... they’re you. All four of them."

"My father told me she had an abortion and took three million dollars," I said, every word tasting like ground glass. "He told me she left a note saying she was never cut out for this life. And all these years, I believed him. I hated her for it."

"The old man was ruthless, Dom," Marcus said quietly, sorrow in his tone. "He wanted you married to high society. He thought Clara Vance, a girl from an orphanage with no pedigree, would make you weak. A man with a woman he truly loves is a man with a throat waiting to be cut."

"He lied to me about my own flesh and blood," I growled, reaching inside my lapel. My fingers closed around the velvet box containing the five-carat emerald-cut diamond meant for Sloane Harrington.

A political transaction. A cold, hollow contract designed to turn the Moretti family into legitimate aristocrats.

I rolled down the window. The freezing wind slapped my face. With a flick of my wrist, I hurled the velvet box into the overflowing storm drain below. Fifty thousand dollars vanished into the sewer muck without a ripple.

"Follow her," I commanded the driver. "Keep your distance. If she senses a tail, she might crash."

The silver Honda sputtered to life, blowing a cloud of white exhaust into the evening air, and pulled out onto Commonwealth Avenue. We followed like a ghost through the labyrinth of Boston traffic, crossing the bridge away from the glittering skyscrapers toward the working-class streets of Dorchester.

She pulled up in front of a weathered triple-decker apartment building. Paint peeled from the porch railings. A flickering streetlamp barely illuminated the rusted chain-link fence.

This was where the sons of Dominic Moretti lived. While I sat in a twenty-room penthouse on Beacon Hill drinking scotch aged longer than their lives.

"Marcus," I said, undoing my silk tie and tossing it onto the leather seat. "Stay outside. Nobody comes up those stairs. Not the Harringtons, not my uncle, not God himself."

"Dom, you walk in there unarmed, you don't know what kind of fight she's got in her."