Chapter 1

I climbed into a mob boss's bed with his wife sleeping right next door—and believe it or not, Napoleon Bonaparte was the one who told me to do it.

Yeah. That Napoleon. That short French guy with his hand shoved in his coat.

Here's the deal.

My boss, Vivian Ashford, is five months pregnant with the Conti heir. Old money princess, Ivy League snob, married into the Conti crime family after her daddy got indicted by the Feds and lost everything.

She hates it here. Hates the guns. Hates the guys in tracksuits. Hates her husband, Luca Conti — the family's Enforcer and the next Don.

Today the baby kicked her too hard.

"That's a soldier in there," she hissed, one hand on her belly. "A knuckle-dragger. Just like his father."

My inner voice: Lady, it's a fetus. It doesn't have a résumé yet.

Nonna Sofia, Luca's grandmother, was down on her knees in a five-thousand-dollar dress. "Vivian, please. He's the only heir we've got. *Please.*"

Luca stood by the window, jaw locked, eyes red. He didn't beg. Men like him don't. But you could feel it — the whole weight of the Conti name pressing on his shoulders.

Vivian's eyes slid over to me. I was folding her laundry in the corner like a good little maid.

She laughed. Cold. Mean.

"Y'know what? I'd rather that little rat over there pop out a poet's baby than carry a thug's kid."

That's when I saw them.

Five balls of gold light. Floating right behind her head. Furious.

"You stupid bitch!" one of them screamed. "The Family's bled for this country for a hundred years, and Heaven sent us — us! — to be born into it!"

I nearly dropped the laundry.

Because the loudest of the five had a face I'd seen a hundred times. History Channel. Vivian's coffee-table book. The oil painting hanging in Don Salvatore's study.

Short. Sharp eyes. Hand tucked into the front of his coat.

"Oh my God," I whispered. "You're — you're Napoleon."

He tipped an invisible hat. "*Bonjour, chérie.*"

The other four glowing lights bounced around him like puppies. He waved at them. "My best marshals. Died with me at Waterloo. Good boys."

I choked on air.

"Listen up, kid," Napoleon barked in my head. "Whoever births us? That family gets two U.S. Senators. Three four-star generals. Grandma here gets a Presidential Medal, easy."

"But this Ashford snob won't have us. So we've got seventy-two hours. Find us a womb, or we disappear. Poof. Gone forever."

My heart was slamming against my ribs.

Classy morals? Y'kidding me? I sold myself to this family when I was fifteen just to survive. Classy is a luxury.

That night, I put on the sheerest slip I owned and knocked on Luca Conti's bedroom door.

---

I'd barely touched the edge of his bed before a hand shot out and clamped around my throat.

Luca stared up at me. Dead eyes. Hair still damp from the shower.

His voice was low, rough, unimpressed. "Where'd a good little maid learn a stunt like that?"

I dropped to my knees on his hardwood floor.

"Sir, My life is hard enough as it is. What do I care about being classy? Let me carry your child. Please."

He laughed. Not a nice laugh.

"Oh yeah? Vivian sent you, didn’t she? She thinks my family’s blood is too low to be worthy of her, so she sent you to serve me in her place? Or you just here for the money?"

My eyes burned. I bit my lip hard.

"No, that’s not how it is."

"The Conti family bled for this country. Every dock, every union, every neighborhood you protect — my mama lived on the streets you kept safe. A name like that doesn't deserve to die out."

He went quiet. His throat moved.

"Doctors say I can't have kids, Ellie. Took a bullet in the gut in Kosovo when I was nineteen. That baby in Vivian's belly? Miracle. One-in-a-million."

His hand slid down to my jaw.

"You wanna give me an heir? Prove you can."

He tore the slip off me and pressed me into the sheets.

The canopy dropped. And in the dark, the five gold lights were doing cartwheels.

"YES! Mama! We found our mama!"

"Go again! We gotta make it stick!"

I don't know how long it took. Eventually the lights went quiet. Napoleon's youngest little soldier did a happy somersault mid-air.

"Mama… we're not gonna disappear anymore…"

Then I blacked out.

---

Sunrise. The bedroom door slammed open like a bomb.

Vivian. In full silk robe. Three maids behind her.

"Luca, if you don't play by my rules today, I swear to God, this brutish little kid of yours is going straight into a trash can—"

She saw me. In her husband's bed. Naked under the sheet.

Her face went bright red.

"You filthy little bitch."

She crossed the room in three steps and slapped me. Once. Twice. Three times.

"Ten years I've had you around me! Ten years! And you learned nothing but how to crawl into a man's bed?!"

I held my burning cheek, and the whole thing felt like a bad joke.

Classy morals? Sure, Vivian. Real classy.

When my mama was dying, I got on my knees in her marble foyer and begged for a two-hundred-dollar advance on my paycheck for antibiotics.

She sipped her chamomile tea and told me, "Elena, when it's your time, it's your time. Money is vulgar. We don't beg."

She let my mama die on a cot in the servants' shed.

That winter, she quoted some poet — "character is built through suffering" — and shut off the heat in the staff quarters. To "build our character." Meanwhile, her own fireplace roared 24/7.

That's her class. Built on the backs of people like me.

"You're absolutely right, ma'am," I said, sitting up on my elbows. "Some of us can't afford to eat morals for breakfast."

"You *talk back to me?!*"

Vivian was shaking. "Drag this whore out and kill her! I want it done in the courtyard! *Now!*"

Up above, the five gold lights went wild. "Bad lady! She's hitting our mama! Daddy! Daddy help!"

Marco, the old butler, came skidding in. "Mrs. Ashford, please! Last night the Boss — "

"*Shut up!*" Vivian shrieked. "I am the Mrs. in this house! I don't need permission to gut a bed-hopping tramp! Try me again, old man, and I'll bury you too!"

Two goons grabbed my arms. Yanked me off the bed. My feet hit cold floor.

Then a voice cracked through the doorway like a gunshot.

"*Hands off.*"

"Whose call is it to touch what's mine?"