Chapter 1 - Blood on the Castellano Crest
Blood was running from Emma Carter’s mouth when Marco carried her through the gates of my Manhattan townhouse.
Rain followed them across the marble.
Her white housekeeping polo had been torn at the shoulder, and the dark Castellano crest embroidered over her heart was soaked red.
I had watched powerful men collapse across conference tables without blinking.
Seeing Emma like that did something entirely different.
“Doctor,” I said.
Lucia was already calling him.
Marco lowered Emma carefully onto the long bench beneath the entrance mirror.
“She was breathing when I found her.”
His voice was tight.
Marco Bellini had worked for my family twenty-three years. He had buried my father, protected my sister, and once taken a bullet during a warehouse robbery before I was old enough to understand what loyalty cost.
I trusted very few people.
Marco had always been one of them.
My name is Dominic Castellano.
The papers called me a shipping magnate when they liked me and a mob heir when they didn’t.
Both descriptions contained enough truth to sell advertising.
My father built Castellano Freight through trucking, cold storage, port contracts, and relationships respectable men pretended not to understand.
When I inherited the company, I spent a decade dragging it toward legitimacy.
No protection money.
No rigged bids.
No men disappearing behind warehouses.
That disappointed some people.
It threatened others.
Emma Carter had nothing to do with any of it.
She had worked in my home for fourteen months.
Twenty-two years old.
Quiet.
Stubborn.
Always exhausted.
Lucia told me why after catching her asleep in the laundry room one morning.
Emma worked three jobs because her mother’s cancer had left the family with debt, and her nineteen-year-old brother Noah had lost both legs after being hit by a truck three years earlier.
Every morning, Emma cleaned my house.
At night, she served drinks in Hell’s Kitchen.
Weekends, office cleaning.
She never complained.
That Thursday, Lucia tried to stop her from leaving.
“You look terrible.”
Emma smiled.
“I need tips more than sleep.”
Four blocks from my townhouse, two men stepped from an alley.
Emma surrendered her wallet and phone.
Then one noticed the crest on her uniform.
“You work for Castellano.”
“I clean his house.”
The man laughed.
“Kolov will like this.”
Then they beat her.
Seventeen minutes later, Marco found her facedown in the rain.
Now my doctor knelt beside her while Lucia held a towel beneath her head.
I crouched.
“Emma.”
Her eyelids moved.
“Who did this?”
Her lips barely opened.
“One had… tattoo.”
“Where?”
“Wrist.”
“What tattoo?”
She swallowed painfully.
“Snake.”
Behind me, Marco went completely still.
I noticed.
“What?”
He looked at me.
“Kolov’s men used snakes years ago.”
Emma’s fingers twitched against the marble.
“He said… Kolov.”
The entrance hall went silent.
Sergei Kolov.
My father’s oldest rival.
The man whose companies still competed with mine for port access from Brooklyn to Newark.
Marco lowered his voice.
“Boss, if they hit one of your household people wearing your crest, they knew exactly what they were doing.”
I stood.
That was obvious.
What bothered me was something else.
Marco had found Emma seventeen minutes after she was attacked.
Nobody had called him.
Nobody had called me.
And the alley where he supposedly found her was nowhere near his normal route home.
At the time, I pushed that thought aside.
May you like
I was still looking at Emma’s blood.
That was my first mistake.
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