Chapter 3 - The Screaming Mansion
The scream that tore through the heavy, rain-slicked air didn’t come from the driveway. It echoed from the second-floor balcony of the mansion, sharp and terrified.
Roman didn’t even look up. His eyes remained locked on his mother, Vivienne, whose face had turned the color of ash.
“Check it,” Roman commanded, his voice a low growl that cut through the thunder.
Three of his personal guards bolted up the marble steps, guns drawn. Within seconds, the heavy oak doors swung open, and Marcus, Roman’s right-hand man, dragged a woman out into the rain. It was Clara, Vivienne’s personal maid—the very woman who had held the shears against my scalp less than twenty minutes ago.
Clara was shaking, her hands covered in dark, wet blood.
“She tried to burn the rest of the ledger, Boss,” Marcus said, shoving her to her knees on the wet gravel. “When I stopped her, she tried to stab me. She missed.”
I leaned heavily against Roman, his warm, expensive wool coat the only thing keeping me from freezing alive. My shaved head burned under the freezing rain, a brutal reminder of the humiliation I had just endured. But as I looked at Clara, and then at Vivienne, the fear inside me began to morph into something else.
Queens girls don’t stay down. We fight.
“You knew,” Roman said again, stepping past the bleeding maid straight toward his mother. The rain soaked through his dark hair, plastering it against his forehead, making him look like an avenging demon. “The will was never meant to be hidden. My father left everything to my firstborn daughter. You knew Bianca was carrying a girl.”
Vivienne straightened her spine, trying to salvage whatever dignity she had left. “Your father was dying and delusional, Roman! A girl cannot lead the Kane family. The commissions would tear us apart within a week. I did what was necessary to protect our legacy!”
“By trying to kill my child?” Roman’s voice didn’t rise, but the sheer malice in it made everyone around him take a step back. “By humiliating my wife?”
“She is a nobody!” Vivienne shrieked, pointing a trembling, diamond-ringed finger at me. “Look at her! A waitress from Queens! She doesn’t belong in this world, and neither does that bastard in her belly!”
Before Vivienne could finish her sentence, Roman’s hand snapped out, gripping his mother’s throat.
The guards gasped. The family lawyer dropped his briefcase, papers scattering into the mud. No one in the history of the Kane syndicate had ever raised a hand to Vivienne. She was the matriarch, the untouchable queen of the underworld.
But Roman wasn’t just a mafia boss anymore. He was a husband, and he was a father.
“If you ever speak about my wife or my daughter again,” Roman whispered, his grip tightening until Vivienne’s eyes bulged, “I will forget that we share blood. I will bury you in the same nameless graveyard where you put your enemies.”
“Roman...” I choked out, gasping for breath as a sharp, sudden pain shot through my lower abdomen.
He froze. Instantly, he let go of his mother, letting her collapse to the wet stone porch, coughing and gasping for air. Roman spun around, capturing me in his arms before my knees could hit the ground.
“Bianca! What is it?”
“The baby,” I whimpered, clutching his shirt as another wave of agonizing pain ripped through my body. The dress beneath his coat felt suddenly soaked with something warmer than the rain. “Roman... it hurts. Something is wrong.”
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The family doctor, who had been standing by with his medical kit, rushed forward. He took one look at my pale face and the fluid soaking through my clothes, and his eyes widened in panic.
“The trauma, the cold, the stress,” the doctor muttered, checking my pulse with trembling fingers. “Her water just broke. She’s only eight months pregnant. Roman, we have to get her inside right now. She’s going into labor.”
