"There are no 'what ifs.'" His voice was low, absolute, the voice of a man who had bent the world to his will for forty years. "Mia is my daughter. She will come through this. She has to. For us."
Donna Elena Valducci stood at her husband's side. She had arrived minutes after the motorcade, stepping from her own car with the composure of a woman who had been the matriarch of the most powerful crime dynasty on the Eastern Seaboard for over two decades. Her posture was immaculate. Her dark hair was pulled back. Her hands did not tremble.
But her eyes told a different story.
She clutched Don Vittorio's arm, her manicured fingers pressing into the fabric of his overcoat with a force that whitened her knuckles. Tears gathered along her lower lashes but did not fall. Beneath the grief, beneath the terror of a mother watching her child slip toward death, there burned something far more dangerous. Wrath. Pure, incandescent, Sicilian wrath. The kind that did not scream. The kind that waited, and remembered, and repaid every debt with interest compounded in blood.