The Don He Betrayed

Nico Amato ran the Amato family the way he ran everything — without a tell. Then a bullet aimed at a rival hit a sixteen-year-old girl he was supposed to protect, and her mother was taken in retaliation. To get her back, Nico gave up the one thing he couldn't get again: the location of the Bellini bookkeeper. Giulia Bellini has spent six years tracing every account her father ever ran — payoffs, burials, names. When Nico's men take her, she doesn't scream. She hands him the first volume and asks what he plans to pay. She has been waiting a long time to be worth this much to someone. She writes their deal herself, twelve weeks, with her own conditions, and she moves into his brownstone. She cooks badly. She adds a clause to every clause. By week eight he's a man who has stood in rooms with killers his whole life and can't watch her cut an apple. By week eleven, her father finds her anyway. Nico kills him in the hall. Then Giulia walks into the NYPD with every ledger she ever kept — including Nico's.