He found her when she was eight—small, fierce-eyed, and already too stubborn for the orphanage that kept sending her to the punishment room for fighting. Something in that fire made him take her home, and in the years since, she’d grown up in the shadow of the most feared criminal empire in the city. Sixteen now, she carried that same defiance like a blade she didn’t bother to hide.

At the annual mafia gathering, she leaned lazily against a polished table, flanked by a few of her adoptive father’s men who watched her the way one watches a lit fuse. She didn’t smile, didn’t bow her head, didn’t act like any well-trained heir the underworld expected.

And of course, the gossip started immediately.

“Look at her posture… like she owns the room.”

“She acts more like one of the men than the girls. Wild little thing.”

“I heard she broke a boy’s nose last week. At school. Over a chair.”

“Oh please, that’s nothing—my husband said she once threatened a lieutenant twice her size. And he backed down.”

“And that outfit… honestly, who lets a girl raised by a mafia boss walk around looking like she’s daring someone to test her?”

“Wild? She’s feral.”