Too Late For Regret: The Mafia Princess

Three years ago, my biological brother, the ruthless Don of New York, dragged me back to his compound.

But he didn't bring me home to be the Mafia Princess; he brought me back to be a lowly maid for his manipulative adopted sister, Serafina.

On the anniversary of our parents' death, I only wanted to place a single white rose on their grave.

Cassio ordered his heavily armed soldiers to barricade the mausoleum, looking at me with profound irritation.

"If you do not drop to your knees and beg Serafina for permission, I will permanently erase your existence from this bloodline," he threatened.

To appease Serafina's fake tears, Cassio had locked me in a windowless basement, banned me from family banquets, and forced me to bow to her in front of his Capos.

When I finally refused to submit, he froze my bank accounts, threw me out of his armored SUV onto the highway, and decreed that no one in the city could hire me, trying to starve me into crawling back.

I couldn't understand why he bothered to extract me from my civilian life just to let a fake bloodline torture his real sister.

Standing in the dirt, my heart went completely dead, and any remaining hope for this family shattered.

I stripped off the heavy diamond necklace he gave me and threw it onto the gravel like industrial waste.

Then, I pulled out my hidden burner phone and texted my other brother, Leo, the deadliest rising boss in the underworld.

"Come pick me up," I sent. "I am abandoning this cursed surname forever."

Chapter 1

Gia POV

The heavily armed soldiers of the New York Syndicate crossed their assault rifles, forming an impenetrable barricade between me and the family mausoleum.

Standing before them was my biological brother, the most ruthless Mafia Don on the East Coast.

"You have to beg her," he told me, referring to his adopted sister, "if you want the right to mourn our dead parents."

"If you do not drop to your knees and submit to her right now," he threatened, his voice a lethal whisper, "I will permanently erase your existence from this bloodline."

At that exact moment, the burner phone hidden deep in my pocket pulsed with a distinct, rhythmic vibration-two short bursts followed by a long one. It was the secure signal I had established with the deadliest rising boss in the underworld. I didn't need to look at the screen to know what the code meant. "Three days until I land, Gia," the silent message conveyed to my racing heart. "Keep breathing, and I will burn their empire to the ground for you."

I stood rooted to the pristine gravel, my posture unyielding as a gust of wind, smelling of damp earth and distant decay, whipped a loose strand of hair across my mouth.

Cassio's shadow fell over me, a chilling eclipse.

He was the Don of the Family, a title that gave him dominion over every illegal port, every compromised official, and every drop of blood that stained the five boroughs. His suits of dark English wool were tailored to conceal the cold geometry of the weapons he carried, and his mere presence was an atmospheric pressure that bent the spines of lesser men. But now, the full weight of that authority was being leveraged against the very tissue and bone that bound us by birth.

He publicly maintained to his Capos that I was merely a maid in his compound. He did it all because Serafina-the adopted girl with no claim to our lineage-was prone to manipulative fits whenever I was afforded a shred of dignity.

Today was the anniversary of our biological parents' deaths. I only wanted to place a single white rose on their stone.

A single, warm tear traced a path through the grime on my cheek, a distillation of pure frustration and three years of airless isolation within his walls.

Cassio registered the glint of moisture on my skin, and the sound that escaped him was not a sigh, but the impatient exhalation of a man whose prize stallion refuses a jump. He regarded me not with pity, but with the profound irritation of a master for a disobedient creature.

"Go inside and ask Serafina," he said, and the cadence of his speech was a carefully constructed insult. "She might grant you leave to stand on the consecrated ground of this Family."

A void opened up beneath my ribs. The track of the tear on my cheek grew cold, and with that small shift in temperature, the wellspring of my grief ran dry.

I thought about the blood money left behind when my civilian guardians were assassinated. I thought about my adoptive brother, Leo, who took that money and disappeared not into shadows, but into the labyrinth of rusty fire escapes and windowless basements of the outer boroughs, forging his own dark enterprise. My phone had just told me he was coming back.

A strange lightness permeated my limbs, a current that displaced the chill of Cassio's dismissal. I took a deliberate step back from the armed guards, my movements measured and silent. I understood then that I could not spare another drop of saltwater for this name, this house, this blood.

Cassio read my stillness as consent. He stepped forward, and his large, calloused hand descended upon the crown of my head-a proprietary, almost agricultural gesture.

"Good girl," he said, the words a low rumble as his fingers tangled in my hair. "Finally learning the rules of my house."

As a gesture of his supposed magnanimity, he offered, "I will go inside and negotiate with Serafina on your behalf," a concession that churned like bile in my throat.

Cassio turned his broad back to me and entered the grand marble mausoleum. He left me standing outside with his Soldiers.

One of the guards caught the eye of another, a flicker of a smile playing on his lips before it was suppressed.

"A maid has no right to honor the late Don," one of them muttered, the insult pitched to carry on the wind.

My gaze fell, and I found myself studying the expensive leather shoes Cassio had bought for me, now scuffed with the dust of this place. Bringing me back to the Syndicate had been his decree; allowing him to do so was the gravest error of my life.

From deep inside the mausoleum, Serafina's voice, high and arrogant, ricocheted off the stone.

She shouted at the Don.

"Why should an unworthy peasant be allowed near the graves?" she demanded, her voice thin and sharp as a shard of glass.

The muscles around my lungs constricted, making each breath a deliberate, painful effort. In that moment, the abstract concept of mafia loyalty dissolved into a grim certainty: all the Family's protection was hoarded by the one who slept on 800-thread-count Egyptian cotton, the girl for whom the entire household held its breath when she so much as coughed. My true fealty belonged only to the civilian guardians who raised me, and to Leo.

"I will buy you that custom imported sports car," Cassio's deep voice promised, a desperate bid to appease Serafina's tantrum.

Only after securing the million-dollar bribe did Serafina loudly decree, "Fine! She can enter to bow exactly once!"

Cassio walked back out into the sunlight. He wore a placid, self-satisfied expression, wholly unaware of the delicate structures he had just demolished within me.

He reached for me, and the rough pads of his fingers locked onto the ulna of my wrist, the force great enough to cut off the return of blood; a numb tingling of oxygen deprivation quickly spread to my fingertips.

"Serafina has generously granted you access," he informed me.

With a violent twist of my torso, I tore my arm from his hold. The sudden movement made the guards flinch, their hands dropping to their holsters.

With a stillness in my blood I did not know I possessed, I refused to enter.

"I will wait outside the perimeter," I told him.

The masseter muscle in Cassio's jaw clenched, causing a vein on the side of his neck to pulse erratically; the foot he had been about to move hung suspended in mid-air.

His smile did not vanish; it was surgically removed, leaving behind something stark and dangerous.

"You are disrespecting my authority in front of my men," he accused, his voice losing its resonance, becoming flat and hard as packed earth. "You are throwing a tantrum."

I lifted my chin, a small, deliberate movement. My eyes were clear and empty as I met the gaze of the most dangerous man in New York.

"Do you believe," I asked him, my voice as steady and cool as the marble of the tomb, "that I am the one throwing a tantrum?"

A flicker of something unreadable passed through Cassio's eyes-a hairline crack in the granite facade of the Don. It vanished as quickly as it appeared, but I had seen it. For the first time, he was uncertain.