Page 2 of Double Trouble for the Mafia Prince

When my youngest brother was executed by the Don himself, there was no confusion about what it meant.

It was a clean severance, the kind of message that does not require repetition.

We were finished.

The response was surgical.

Our assets were seized, our accounts emptied, and all but a few of our trusted allies either disappeared or turned.

Properties that had carried our family’s name for generations were signed over to holding companies in the Salvatores' pocket.

Every inch of Nuova Speranza that once belonged to us was parceled out and repurposed until there was barely a trace of who we had been.

For a long time, we lived in the gray spaces.

No invitations. No alliances. No protection beyond what scraps our name could still demand from those too conservative to forsake us completely.

It should have ended there.

But survival runs deeper than pride.

And survival was the one skill I had never been allowed to forget.

I requested a meeting with Valentina Salvatore when no one else from my family dared to speak her name.

I walked into that room with no titles to offer, no army at my back, and no illusions about the balance of power.

I brought something else instead.

I brought leverage and intelligence.

Valentina did not need another desperate ally.

She needed someone who could think four moves ahead, someone who understood the language of diplomacy as well as the machinery of war.

I gave her both.

I offered her access to networks that had survived the fall, old routes and foreign connections that the Salvatores had not yet fully absorbed.

I gave her the names of men who would never kneel to Luca or Marco, but who still answered when a Rossi called.

I promised efficiency, discretion, and loyalty where it mattered most: not to her crown, but to her vision of the future.

And in return, she gave me something no one else would have.

She gave me relevance.

Under her, we rebuilt—not as an empire, but as a vessel, a critical artery in the wider body of Salvatore power.

The Rossis became specialists.

We handled negotiations that required the illusion of neutrality, acquisitions that needed a lighter, familiar hand.

We brokered deals that could not bear the direct weight of the Salvatore name.

We survived by becoming indispensable.

And I rose by making sure no one, not even the queen herself, would find it easy to replace me.