“Please mister, buy this painting so we can buy bread,” three dirty triplets begged. The billionaire mafia boss stared at the canvas, his heart stopping. The woman painted on it was the wife he mourned for years. With shaking hands, he pulled out a black card and whispered, “Take me to her.”

I had spent a decade teaching an entire city to fear my surname, weaponizing dread to build an empire. But I never, not in my worst nightmares, imagined that Elena would learn to speak that language too. She had looked at me and seen a monster.

I turned my back on the photograph, pacing toward the floor-to-ceiling windows. Boston glittered below, a continue reading …