Chapter 1 - The Queen’s Arrival and the Battle of the White RosesKatarina Moretti objected to the roses before she said hello.
She stopped beneath the chandelier, rain shining on the shoulders of her black coat, and looked at the white arrangement on the entrance table. Her gloves were soft leather. Her pearls were old enough to have appeared in photographs beside three generations of Moretti men.
“White roses.”
I glanced at the flowers. “Good afternoon to you too.”
“They’re for funerals.”
“And weddings.”
“Not in this house.”
Behind her, Marco became intensely interested in the luggage tags.
I had been married to Dante for eight months. In that time, I had learned that his mother rarely raised her voice. She preferred to make a room feel as though everybody in it had disappointed her.
I smiled.
“Then it’s fortunate there hasn’t been a funeral.”
Dante stood beside the staircase in a dark suit, one hand in his pocket. His mouth moved slightly.
His mother noticed.
“You never told me your wife was sarcastic.”
“I thought you’d enjoy discovering things in common.”
Marco made a small sound, disguised it as a cough, and reached for the suitcases.
“I’ll have these taken upstairs.”
Nobody answered.
He left anyway.
Katarina removed her gloves and looked around the hall.
For nearly twenty years, this had been her home. She had raised Dante here, entertained here, and waited through nights she never discussed. After Alessandro died, she moved to Connecticut, but pieces of her life remained: books, photographs, furniture, a private sitting room upstairs.
I had never wanted to erase them.
I had wanted room for my own life beside them.
Her gaze stopped on an empty section of wall.
“Where is the Bellini?”
“In the library.”
“Why?”
“Dante disliked it.”
She turned toward him.
“You never said that.”
“You never asked.”
There was no cruelty in his voice. That seemed to trouble her more.
She looked back at me, measuring the cream blouse, the dark skirt, the wedding ring she had once called “rather modern” as though describing a regrettable medical treatment.
“The house is different.”
“A few things.”
“I can see that.”
I could feel the answer waiting on my tongue.
Yes. I live here.
Instead, I said, “Your room is ready.”
She put her gloves into her handbag.
“The east guest suite?”
“It has the best light.”
Her hand stopped on the staircase railing.
For a moment, she looked genuinely confused.
“Why would I be in the guest suite?”
Dante’s posture changed.
Not dramatically.
Enough that I noticed.
“Because you’re visiting, Mother.”
Katarina looked at him.
Then at me.
The rain tapped against the glass above the front door.
“What happened to my bedroom?”
I had prepared for criticism about the flowers. The menu. The fact that I preferred the sitting-room curtains open.
I had not prepared for the particular expression on her face when she asked that question.
Dante answered before I could.
“It’s our bedroom now.”
Silence settled through the hall.
I knew that room had once contained her marriage. I also knew she had moved out three years before I ever met her son.
Both things could be true.
Apparently, in that moment, she had room for only one.
“Our bedroom,” she repeated.
“Yes.”
She looked at my husband as though somebody had quietly replaced him.
Then her eyes returned to me.
For the first time since she arrived, there was no polished criticism to hide behind.
Only a question she did not ask aloud.
What else have you taken?
Katarina lifted her chin and continued upstairs.
Dante reached for my hand.
Before his fingers closed around mine, his mother stopped on the landing.
“And my sitting room?”
I looked toward the west corridor, where her door had remained untouched.
“That’s exactly as you left it.”
Her gaze held mine.
“It had better be.”
The heavy silence of the Moretti estate stretched deep into the evening hours. Downstairs, the grandfather clock chimed eight times, echoing through marble corridors that had witnessed decades of blood, alliances, and unbroken silence. Dante sat across from me in the study, his laptop open, but his eyes were fixed on the flicker of the fireplace.
“She’s testing boundaries, Elena,” he murmured, his voice low and rich like aged bourbon. “She always does. She thinks because she built this empire alongside my father from the ashes of the old syndicate, she still holds the deed to our lives.”
“I don’t mind her testing, Dante. It’s the entitlement,” I replied, turning a page of the ledger I was reviewing. As his wife—and increasingly, the person managing the operational books of his legitimate logistics front—I knew every fragile stitch holding this family together. “She looked at me today like I was a temporary tenant who forgot to wipe her feet.”
May you like
Dante stood, walked over, and placed his warm hands on my shoulders. His touch grounded me instantly. “She is a ghost trying to haunt a house that has new walls. Don’t let her get under your skin. If she crosses a line—any line—tell me.”
Little did we know, the line was already being crossed just down the hallway in the west wing.
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