Page 144 of The Killer Cupcake
"Ciao," she said, letting the word roll off her tongue like aged bourbon.
"Ciao, bel—" His voice, velvet poured over broken glass, caught mid-word. Then he paused, letting his gaze sweep over her. She could read the calculations spinning behind that beautiful face:Black. American. Here. Wife?
The confusion lasted barely a heartbeat before his training kicked in, but Kathy had been reading men since before this boy had taken his first breath. She'd seen that look before—in Manhattan boardrooms, in Little Italy restaurants, in a hundred places where her presence upset careful equations about power and place.
"Is this the Ricci place?” He recovered smoothly, but she heard the slight adjustment in his tone, the recalibration of a young man raised on stories of Sicilian and Italian purity encountering something outside his world.
"It is for now." She leaned against the doorframe with deliberate ease, studying him with the same intensity he'd shown her. Let him look. Let him wonder how Henry Freeman's daughter had become Carmelo Ricci's queen. "And you must be Giovanni Battaglia?”
The visitor smirked at her coy manner.
“Please, come in."
Something dangerous flickered across his face—pride wounded, perhaps. "Grazie, for the warm greeting, but I am not Giovanni."
Marco's hand moved subtly toward the weapon under his arm. Kathy's pulse quickened with the thrill of the unexpected, though her face remained a mask of polite interest. She stopped her step and turned to face him. ”Oh? Then who are you?"
His gaze swept over the accommodations they had acquired in the village with approval, then landed on her again. She saw him make a decision—to play this game on equal footing, tradition be damned. The hunger in his eyes sharpened into something more calculating. Here was a boy raised to inherit an empire, finding something he'd never factored into his equations for power.
"Lorenzo Battaglia." He paused, letting the name settle between them like a declaration of war. "I'm his other half. The better half. And you must be…?”
“Donna Katherine Freeman Ricci." She used her full name deliberately, adding the label of Donna to her Don. Something Ernesto coached her on before the visit. She watched him again process the information he had presumed. "I'm Don Ricci's better half."
His perfectly sculpted features arranged themselves into an expression of intrigued recognition. This young wolf had done his homework, but clearly, the briefings hadn't included her. "Ah? I've heard of you." The lie came smooth as silk, but she heard the curiosity bleeding through. A Black American woman who'd claimed a Don. In his uncle's rigid world, she was an impossibility made flesh.
"Now I'm confused. Who invited you, Lorenzo? This party is for Giovanni only.”
The bark of laughter that escaped him was genuine—dark chocolate laced with arsenic. He walked deeper into the villa,passing her, with the confidence of a young god who'd never met a rule he couldn't break, but she noticed how his eyes kept returning to her, trying to solve the puzzle she represented.
"I'm the man he needs to speak to." Each word dripped with the arrogance of youth convinced of its own immortality. "Trust me. I run things."
"Do you?" She let amusement color her voice. This boy, trying to steal his cousin's thunder, had no idea he'd just walked into a game where the rules had been written by survivors, not inheritors.
"We shall see," she purred, moving past him with deliberate grace, letting him catch a whisper of her perfume—jasmine and lavendere, her mother's formula.
"Come with me," Kathy said, leading him toward the veranda where breakfast waited like a beautifully laid trap. He followed, and she could feel his eyes on her, trying to reconcile everything he'd been taught about the old ways with the reality of her American existence.
Marco followed them both, his attention sharp as a blade. He knew, as she did, that Lorenzo Battaglia had just complicated everything. This wasn't just Giovanni's ambitious cousin—this was a young man who'd walked in expecting to find the usual players and discovered instead that the game itself had changed.
As they stepped onto the sun-drenched, white limestone veranda, Kathy allowed herself a small, private smile. Carmelo had prepared for Giovanni—steady, traditional Giovanni who played by the rules. But Lorenzo? Lorenzo was hunger made flesh, ambition without wisdom, beauty without restraint. A wild card. Possibly the only card in the deck they needed.
