The Mafia Boss Needed a Date for His Brother’s Wedding—So He Brought the Woman the Bride’s Family Had Sent to Prison

The penthouse terrace was cold, swept by a bitter wind blowing off the Hudson.

Dominic stood near the railing, a glass of neat bourbon in his hand, watching the fog roll over the city below. The door to the terrace opened, and Lucas walked out.

He was no longer wearing his ivory wedding tuxedo. He wore a rumpled wool coat, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, his hair wild from the wind. He looked exhausted, haunted, the boyish innocence that Dominic had spent fifteen years protecting completely stripped away.

Lucas walked to the railing, stopping three paces from his older brother. He didn't look at Dominic. He looked at the gray river below.

“Claire left,” Lucas said, his voice flat.

Dominic took a sip of his bourbon. “Where did she go?”

“Her mother’s house in the Hamptons,” Lucas said. “She screamed at me for two hours before she packed her bags. She said I was a fraud. She said I was just a mobster’s kid pretending to be a gentleman, and that my family had ruined her father.”

Lucas turned to face Dominic, his eyes red-rimmed and fierce with pain.

“Was it true, Dominic? Everything she said? Everything Evelyn said?”

Dominic turned slowly. He looked at his younger brother—the boy he had held when their father was gunned down in a parking garage in Queens; the boy whose tuition he had paid with money extracted from loan shark books and backroom poker games; the boy he had kept clean so that one Vale, just one, could walk in the sunlight.

“Richard Whitmore was stealing from his own company for five years, Lucas,” Dominic said quietly. “He used you. He wanted the Vale name because he thought our money would keep the federal prosecutors away. If I hadn’t stepped in, you would have been named as a co-conspirator on three of their shell accounts within six months.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me?” Lucas yelled, his voice cracking against the wind. “Why did you have to turn my wedding into an execution? Why did you bring Evelyn Cross into the middle of my life?”

“Because you wouldn’t have believed me,” Dominic said, stepping toward him, his voice rising with a rare, terrifying heat. “If I came to you with papers, you would have said it was a mafia lie! You would have defended him! You would have chosen them over me!”

Lucas flinched as if struck.

“I spent my entire life taking the dirt,” Dominic said, his hazel eyes burning. “I took the blood. I took the scars. I took the prison threats so you could sit in an ivy-covered classroom and learn about constitutional law! I let you hate me, Lucas! I let you call my work disgusting, because it meant you were clean! But I will be damned if I let a third-rate patrician thief use my brother as a human shield!”

The wind whipped between them, carrying the distant wail of sirens from the streets below.

Lucas looked down at the concrete tiles of the terrace. Tears welled in his eyes, tracking slowly down his cheeks. The rage seemed to drain out of him, replaced by the crushing realization of what his brother had borne for him.

“I thought I was better than you,” Lucas choked out, burying his face in his hands. “I looked down on you, Dominic. Every time you came to visit me at Harvard… every time you sent a wire transfer… I told myself I was different. That I was good.”

Dominic set his glass down on the stone ledge. He closed the distance between them, reached out, and pulled Lucas into a fierce, unyielding embrace.

Lucas gripped his brother’s coat, his shoulders shaking as the grief of a shattered illusion broke over him.

“You are better than me,” Dominic whispered against his brother’s hair, his voice fierce and protective. “You are clean, Lucas. And you’re going to stay clean. You’re opening your own firm tomorrow. Unencumbered. No Whitmore money. No Vale street money. Just your own name.”

Lucas pulled back, wiping his eyes with the back of his sleeve. “And what about you and Evelyn?”

Dominic glanced toward the glass doors leading back into the penthouse, where Evelyn was sitting at the grand dining table, surrounded by legal documents, a telephone pressed to her ear, directing the rebirth of an empire.