PROLOGUE: THE SCENT OF JASMINE Palermo, Sicily — 1989

Elizabeth Moretti learned early on that some flowers are born to be trampled.

Her father told her this the first time he took her to a "business meeting." She was eight years old and wore a white ribbon in her hair. The room smelled of tobacco, expensive leather, and something else: that metallic smell that years later she would learn to call dried blood.

"Look, but don't touch," her mother whispered in her ear, squeezing her shoulder with trembling fingers.

And Elizabeth looked.

She looked at the men in dark suits kissing rings and swearing loyalty with the same ease with which they signed death warrants. She looked at the women with heavy jewelry and empty smiles, sitting like dolls in gilded display cases. She watched her own father, Don Carlo Moretti, kiss the cheeks of men she knew would order her assassination if business demanded it.

Amidst all that filth, Elizabeth grew like a jasmine in a garbage dump: white, fragrant, dangerously pure.

But purity, in her world, wasn't a virtue.

It was a curse.

New York — Present

Don Ezra Salvatore doesn't believe in fate.

He believes in bullets. He believes in alliances. He believes in the surgical precision of a sharp knife. But above all, he believes in one thing: what's his, he protects. And what he protects, no one can take from him.

At thirty-two, Ezra is the youngest man to sit at the head of the Sicilian Commission in nearly a century. His enemies say he has no heart. His allies say he has no mercy. His soldiers say he has no fear.

And so far, they've all been right.

Until he saw her.

It was Carlo Moretti's funeral. A bullet to the back of the head. Internal betrayal. Nothing personal, just business. Ezra went out of respect for the family—or what was left of it—and to make sure that no remnant of the Moretti Empire would ever rise again.

But then, among gray tombstones and a leaden sky, she appeared.

Elizabeth Moretti.

She wasn't in mourning. She wore a cream-colored dress that the New York wind clung to her body as if to protect her from the world. Her dark hair fell over her shoulders. And in her arms, a bouquet of freshly cut jasmine.

She wasn't crying.

That was the first thing Ezra noticed.

While everyone else feigned grief or hid their relief, she walked with the composure of someone who had already buried too much. She passed by him without looking at him. But he looked at her.

And in that instant, the man who didn't believe in fate felt the ground shift beneath his feet.

That night, Ezra Salvatore did something he'd never done before:

He called his lieutenant.

"I want everything you know about Elizabeth Moretti."

"She's a nobody, Don Ezra. Just the youngest daughter. She's never been involved in the business. She lives in a house in Brooklyn with her widowed mother. She paints. She plants flowers."

"Flowers?" Ezra repeated, as if the word tasted like sweet poison.

"Jasmine, I'm told."

Ezra remained silent. Outside, the rain pounded against the windows of his penthouse. And for the first time in years, he felt something he couldn't name.

It wasn't desire. It wasn't obsession. It was something more primal.

It was the certainty that such a fragile flower couldn't survive in a world of wolves.

Or perhaps—she thought as she lit a cigarette—the certainty that he wanted to be the wolf that would devour her.

Three days later

Elizabeth was delivered a black velvet box.

Inside, a silk jasmine and a note written in old-fashioned calligraphy, the kind no one uses anymore:

"In a garden of thorns, even the most beautiful flower learns to bleed. But I don't want your blood, Elizabeth. I want you to look at me the way you looked at your father in his coffin: without fear."

—E.S.

Her fingers trembled as she touched the flower.

Because Elizabeth Moretti wasn't naive. She knew who Ezra Salvatore was. She knew her father had died on the orders of someone like him. She knew that note wasn't a romantic gesture.

It was a declaration of war.