The Mafia King of Philadelphia: From witness to his doted wife

”Oh, come on, Blossom,” the maid muttered. Blossom was the name of the mansion’s dog, a big, loyal thing that mostly slept in patches of sun. ”Stop making noise.”

The maid sighed and walked to the side door, pulled it open, and stepped out into the bright afternoon light. ”Enough,” the maid said, more firmly this time, and gave the dog a light smack on the side, the way she always did when he got worked up over nothing.

Blossom went quiet at once.

The maid frowned. It was strange, how suddenly the barking had stopped, like someone had simply switched it off. She glanced around the garden, at the hedges, at the empty stretch of grass, but there was no one there. She turned back toward the house.

One of the guards was crossing the yard toward her. ”Why is Blossom restless?” he asked, his eyes moving briefly past her, scanning the hedges the way guards always did, out of habit more than suspicion.

”I don’t know,” the maid said, chuckling a little as she pulled the door open again. ”Maybe he’s scared of your big gun.”

She stepped back inside, still smiling, and the door shut quietly behind her.

—

Upstairs, Sienna was still asleep, but somewhere deep in her, a part of her that never fully rested had begun to stir. She felt it before she understood it, a small prickle at the back of her neck, the feeling of being watched.

Her eyes opened slowly, still heavy with sleep, and for a second the room looked ordinary, the same soft light, the same curtains moving gently by the window.

Then she saw the figure. It was standing near the far wall, still, facing them.

Sienna’s breath caught, but she did not scream, and she did not move fast. She reached one hand over and tapped Aria’s shoulder, once, then again.

”Let me sleep some more,” Aria mumbled, turning over, pulling the blanket higher.

Sienna tapped harder. ”Get up,” she whispered. ”Someone is here.”

Aria’s eyes opened at once, all sleep gone from them in an instant, her body already shifting into something tight and ready, the way a person moves when years of training take over before thought does.

”I don’t know who you are or how you managed to get in here,” Aria said, her voice low and hard, ”but let me warn you, I have a black belt. I can take you down. And besides, it’s two against one.” She paused, tilting her head slightly, studying the figure the way she might study an opponent across a mat.

”Well. If you managed to get in here without the guards seeing you, then you must be very smart. But my friend here is very smart too.” She kept going, her words coming faster now, one after another, a wall of sound she was building between them and whoever this was.

Sienna barely heard her. Her mind had already moved somewhere else, fast running through everything she did not have. No needle. That was the first thought that came to her, and right behind it, the realization that she had none of her usual things with her at all.

She had left the Kessler mansion in anger, without planning, without packing. No hidden weapons tucked into a sleeve. No gun. Not even the small, pretty one Viktor had given her, the one that usually sat close to her hand no matter where she slept after being taken by Fabio.

She had none of it. So her mind moved on to the next question. What was close. What in this room could become something else in her hands if it needed to.

The figure did not move. It simply stood there, dressed in dark jeans, a plain hoodie pulled up over the head, and a mask that hid every part of the face. Gloves covered both hands, thin and black, fitted close to the fingers.

Clever, Sienna thought. No fingerprints would be left behind here, no matter what happened next.

Her eyes moved without her head turning, taking in the shape of the room, measuring. The distance from the figure to the bed. The distance from the figure to the window. The distance from the figure to the door.

All three, she realized slowly, were almost exactly the same. It was a strange, precise kind of positioning, the kind that did not happen by accident.

Whoever this was had chosen this spot carefully, standing in the one place in the room that gave them equal reach to everything, an equal number of steps to any way out, any way in.

This was no ordinary person.

Why not scream, Sienna thought, the idea rising and falling almost as fast as it came. But even as she thought it, she already knew the answer.

If this person had come to hurt them, then by the time a scream reached the guards downstairs, by the time boots came pounding up the stairs and down the hall, this person would have already finished whatever they came to do, and would still have more than enough time to be through the window and gone before anyone arrived.

Sienna kept her eyes on the figure, her body very still, her mind moving fast beneath the stillness.

”Who are you,” Sienna asked, once she had run through every option her mind could offer and found none of them enough.

For a long moment, nothing answered her. The figure did not move. It only stood there, still, watching. That silence stretched, one second, then another, and to Sienna and Aria, sitting frozen on the bed, each second felt far longer than it should have, long enough to hold a lifetime inside it.

Then, finally, the figure spoke.

”Hey, baby.”

The voice was soft. Sweet. There was warmth folded into it, a warmth that did not seem to belong in a dark room with a masked stranger standing three equal steps from every way out.

The voice was clear too, clear enough that both girls understood at once, without needing to be told, that whoever stood before them was a woman.

Slowly, the woman raised her gloved hands and reached up to her own head. She peeled back the hood first, letting it fall away from her hair. Then she reached for the mask, and beneath it, a fake beard, pulling both away piece by piece, unhurried, as if she had all the time in the world and wanted them to watch every second of it.