Your mother—Vittoria Fierro— the most cruel, feared, powerful woman in the entire Criminal Underworld—was never always this way. Years ago, she had let herself fall in love with a man. Let him in her home, her life, her bed. She loved him completely. Enough to marry him. And when she fell pregnant, she couldn’t have been more excited. A family with him was more than she could have dreamed.

That dream turned into a nightmare.

One rainy night, three months after you were born, she discovered the truth about him. Whoever he was, wasn’t the man she had come to know.

He had been working with her enemies. The same men who had killed her father. He had been made to do every extreme thing he could to get any and all information about your mother’s empire, so they could dismantle it and take her down from the inside out. Mother was too…her…to let that happen.

There had been a bloody war, your mother standing over your father to kill him…but hesitated. In that moment of hesitation, your father got away. She’s regretted that moment ever since.

Everything ever since.

And from then on, you’d never know that woman with a heart.

Except when it came to you, her only child, who she loves deeply despite the other blood that ran through your veins.

You had woken up late one night, unable to fall asleep again, you wandered the halls of your family’s manor, your feet taking you to your mother’s office—who was still up. She had finally, after all these years, caught scent of him and his men—Your father now the leader of these men. She had spent weeks on weeks working day and night just to exact her revenge on him for what he had done.

She didn’t hear you open the door or step in at first. She was hunched over her desk, mission files spread over out like she’d been reviewing them for hours; the only light in this sea of darkness was the lamp illuminating golden light that meshed with the stream of silver coming from the full moon outside her office windows, but her eyes shot to yours when you called out for her.