SOON, PRINCESS
Isabella Torrino - POV
The sapphire silk clings to my skin like liquid midnight as I glide through Chicago's elite, their champagne laughter ringing hollow in the Palmer House ballroom. Chandeliers cast rainbow prisms across marble floors worth more than most people's houses, and I smile with lips painted blood-red, playing the perfect mafia princess while my new shadow trails behind me like death in an Armani suit.
Marco hasn't left my side for three days. He tastes my food before I do, checks every door I walk through, positions himself between me and every potential threat with the fluid precision of a predator who never stops hunting. The weight of his attention follows my every movement, and I can feel his dark eyes cataloguing exits even as Chicago's wealthiest citizens kiss my cheeks and whisper empty compliments into perfumed air.
"Smile, stellina." Papa appears at my elbow, his tuxedo immaculate as always, his weathered hands steady on the champagne flute he offers. "Tonight you represent the Torrino name."
I accept the crystal glass, letting bubbles tickle my nose while scanning faces I've known since childhood. Senators' wives discussing charity budgets that fund more than orphanages. Judges' daughters wearing diamonds bought with blood money. Business executives whose companies launder fortunes through foundations that exist only on paper.
My world. My cage. My performance.
"The Marchetti delegation is here," Papa murmurs, his voice carrying undertones that make my spine straighten. "Eastern tables. Blue ties."
I find them easily—three men in perfectly tailored suits drinking wine that costs more than cars, their Italian accents smooth as silk over steel. The youngest catches my eye and lifts his glass in mock salute, his smile sharp enough to cut glass.
"Enemies?" I ask, keeping my voice light while my pulse quickens.
"Competitors. There's a difference."
But something in Papa's tone suggests the difference matters less than I'd like to believe.
The evening unfolds like theater—speeches about philanthropy that taste of hypocrisy, auction items donated by companies that exist to hide dirty money, applause that sounds like rainfall on marble while beneath the surface, Chicago's underworld conducts business in whispers and weighted glances.
I'm accepting congratulations on our family's latest charitable donation when the champagne turns bitter on my tongue. Not the wine itself, but something deeper. An instinct inherited from three generations of Torrino blood that recognizes danger wearing service uniforms.
The waiter approaching our table moves wrong. His steps are too measured, his tray held at an angle that hides his right hand, and when he looks at me, his eyes hold the cold calculation of someone who sees target rather than person.
"Marco," I breathe, but he's already moving.
The transformation happens in heartbeats. One moment Marco is my politely distant bodyguard, adjusting his cufflinks and checking his phone like any bored employee. The next, he's flowing toward me with lethal grace, his professional mask falling away to reveal something primitive and deadly.
The first gunshot explodes like thunder.
Screams pierce air thick with cordite and terror as Chicago's elite scatter like beautiful birds with clipped wings. Crystal shatters against marble, champagne mixing with blood while women in designer gowns crawl beneath tables worth more than houses.
Marco's body crashes into mine, bearing us both to the floor in a tangle of silk and desperate flesh. His weight covers me completely, solid warmth and sandalwood cologne mixing with the copper scent of violence as bullets spark off walls around us.
"Stay down," he growls against my ear, his voice rough with something that tastes of fear—not for himself, but for me.
His jacket tears against marble as he shields me with his body, one hand cradling my head while the other produces a gun that appears from nowhere, black metal gleaming in fractured chandelier light. When he rises to return fire, his movements are fluid poetry written in violence, each shot placed with surgical precision.
I should be terrified. Should be screaming, crying, begging for mercy from God or Papa or anyone who might save me from this nightmare of blood and breaking glass.
Instead, I'm exhilarated.
My pulse hammers against my throat like drums calling soldiers to battle, and something deep in my chest unfurls like wings discovering flight. This is real. This is truth stripped of performance, life without the pretty lies that have cushioned every moment since birth.
Through the chaos, I watch Marco become something magnificent and terrible. He moves like darkness given human form, anticipating each threat before it materializes, his body a weapon honed by training I'm only beginning to understand.
A second assassin emerges from kitchen doors, automatic rifle tracking toward my hiding place behind overturned tables. Marco spins, his gun bucking twice in quick succession. The shooter drops, his weapon clattering across marble while blood spreads beneath designer clothes like spilled wine.
"How many?" Marco's voice cuts through sirens wailing in the distance.
"Three confirmed," someone answers—Sal's voice, rough with cigarettes and gunpowder. "Kitchen's clear. Building's locked down."
But Marco's eyes never stop scanning shadows, never stop protecting the space where I lie among torn silk and shattered crystal. When he finally looks down at me, his face is a mask of professional control that can't hide the storm raging underneath.
"Are you hurt?" His hands trace my skin with clinical efficiency, checking for blood while his touch burns through sapphire fabric.
"No." My voice sounds steadier than it should, stronger than I expected. "I'm not hurt."
Something flickers across his features—surprise, maybe, or recognition of something he didn't expect to find in Don Torrino's sheltered princess.
The aftermath unfolds in controlled chaos. Police arrive with questions that taste like accusations, their badges shining like promises they can't keep in a world where justice wears different faces depending on who writes the checks.
Papa appears through smoke and sirens, his tuxedo immaculate despite the violence, his eyes holding calculations that make my stomach clench with sudden unease.
"My daughter," he tells detectives whose names he already knows, whose loyalty he's already bought. "She needs medical attention."
But I don't need doctors or sedatives or the comfortable lies everyone wants to feed me. I need truth. I need to understand why my body sang instead of shrank when death came calling, why Marco's protection felt like coming home to something I never knew I'd lost.
In the limo afterward, my hands shake not from fear but from adrenaline that refuses to fade. Marco sits across from me, his jacket ruined but his eyes alert, scanning Chicago's night-lit streets for threats that might follow us home.
"You did well," he says, and something in his voice makes heat pool low in my belly. "Most people freeze their first time."
"Most people aren't Torrinos."
His smile is sharp as broken glass, there and gone before I can catalog its meaning. But when I reach for my purse—silk clutch somehow survived the chaos—my fingers find something that steals breath from my lungs.
A photograph. Glossy paper that wasn't there when I left the compound this morning.
My mother stares back at me from the image, her dark hair catching sunlight, her lips curved in the secret smile I remember from lullabies and bedtime stories. She stands in what looks like a coffee shop, espresso cup in her manicured hands, wearing clothes that scream expensive and contemporary.
But Elena Torrino died twenty-three years ago.
The date stamp in the corner reads yesterday.
My world tilts off its axis as I realize everything I've believed about death, about loss, about the woman who shaped my earliest memories might be another beautiful lie designed to keep me from truths I'm not sure I want to discover.