A Mafia Boss looked down on his maid after catching her sneaking leftover food out of his mansion

"Mama's here, sweet angel. I've got you."

Beatrice’s voice, muffled by the howling wind, drifted out into the night. It was a voice filled with a desperate, fractured tenderness that I had never heard echo through the gilded halls of my mansion.

I crept closer, keeping low, until I was pressed flat against the rusted exterior wall of the container. Through a narrow gap in the corrugated metal, where a ventilation grate had been ripped away, I peered inside.

The interior was lit by the dim, flickering amber glow of a kerosene heater. It was cramped, freezing, and smelled faintly of damp wool and burning kerosene.

Sitting on a thin, soiled mattress on the floor was a little girl. She couldn't have been more than seven or eight years old. Her face was pale, pinched with cold, and framed by a mop of unruly dark curls. But it wasn't her appearance that froze the blood in my veins.

It was her eyes.

Wide, luminous, and startlingly green. The exact shade of emerald that used to look back at me from across a breakfast table twelve years ago.

"Did you get the warm food, Mama?" the little girl asked, her voice raspy. "My tummy hurts from the quiet."

"I did, Elena. Look what the kind people at the grand house left behind," Beatrice whispered, her hands shaking as she popped open the cracked plastic container. She pulled out a fork, blowing gently on a piece of prime rib before feeding it to the child.

Inside my head, a massive, deafening alarm went off.

Elena.

That name wasn't just any name. It was the name carved into a headstone in an exclusive, private cemetery in the hills of Geneva. A headstone that bore the date of a tragic car crash on a rainy November night—a crash that had supposedly wiped out the last remaining branch of my bloodline.