The Queen's Silent Reign

Sienna Romano

“Perfect, my darling. Absolutely perfect.”

My father’s voice lives in the back of my mind, low and warm, a rumble of approval I’ve spent my whole life chasing. This afternoon, as he walked through the ballroom during the final walkthrough, he stood beside me in the middle of all the chaos. Staff shouting, florists swearing over centerpieces, electricians cursing dimmers, and said it right into my ear. His hand was warm on the small of my back. He smelled of expensive cologne and cigar smoke. The scent of power.

“Your mother would have been so proud,” he’d told me.

I’d offered the correct smile back then. I offer it again now.

“Thank you, Papa,” I murmur under my breath, even though he isn’t here to hear it.

Now the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel glitters in full bloom. Two hundred of the city’s most influential people are here, drinking our champagne, eating our food, and donating obscene amounts of money to the Romano Family Children’s Foundation.

My foundation. My gala. My perfect gilded cage.

A photographer calls my name and I turn just so, angling my face, letting the light catch the diamonds at my throat. The smile I give them doesn’t quite reach my eyes, but it brightens my face just enough for the cameras. That’s all anyone needs.

“Signorina Romano.” A politician’s wife clasps my hand, her bracelets chiming softly. “Everything is exquisite.”

“Thank you,” I say. “We’re honored you could join us.”

We. As if the we of it is here. As if my father isn’t late. As if my brothers aren’t conspicuously absent from their usual flanking positions like dark, smug bookends.

“Your father is delayed, yes?” she asks lightly, like it’s small talk and not the question humming under the surface of the whole room.

“Just a last-minute meeting,” I say smoothly. “You know Papa. He’d hold court in a broom closet if someone owed him a favor.”

She laughs. People always do when I make jokes like that. It lets them pretend they have no idea how true they are.

Papa and my brothers should have been here thirty minutes ago. For the last hour, everyone has been pretending not to notice that they aren’t.

I move through the crowd like I was trained to. Never in a straight line, never too fast, always available but never lingering too long in one place. I am glossy hair and red lips and a custom gown worth more than most people’s cars. I am the charitable face of a criminal empire.

Behind the smile, my mind runs a different program.

I am not looking at the gowns or the jewels.

I am looking at the exits. I am mapping the sightlines. I am identifying threats.

Senator Rawlings stands by the bar, talking a little too closely to Antonio Falcone. Uncle Tony. Papa’s oldest friend. Rawlings has a gambling problem. Falcone owns three casinos in Atlantic City. A problem and a solution having a quiet drink. I make a mental note.

My gaze drifts to the security detail. Papa’s men. The best money and fear can buy.

Two on the main doors. Good.

One on the balcony entrance. Acceptable.

But the service corridor leading to the kitchens? Understaffed. A single delivery truck, a few fake uniforms, and you could have a dozen armed men inside before anyone even noticed the canapés were late.

An unacceptable risk. Another thing to correct. If anyone ever actually listened to me.

“Sienna, darling.”

Beatrice Van Doren glides toward me, her diamond necklace worth more than the hospital wing we’re funding tonight. Her face is a tight mask of polite interest.

“Such a wonderful evening,” she says, air-kissing my cheeks. “You have such a flair for these things.”

“Thank you for coming, Beatrice.” I take her hand, her skin papery and fragile. “It means the world to have your support.”

She pats my hand. “You’re a good girl, Sienna. A credit to your father.”

A good girl.

I am twenty-six years old. I speak four languages. I can analyze a balance sheet faster than my brother Matteo, and I can read a room with more accuracy than Gianni. But to them, to all of them, I am a good girl who throws lovely parties.

My eyes find Luca.

He stands just beyond the edge of the crowd, near a marble column, a ghost in a perfectly tailored suit. Other bodyguards scan the room, their gazes sweeping constantly, cataloging everyone and everything.

Luca’s eyes are on me.

Always on me.

He watches my posture, the set of my shoulders, the tiny flicker of an eyelid. He knows when my smile is real and when it is armor. Right now, he knows I’m wearing a fortress.

He gives a nearly imperceptible nod. Our private language.

I am here. I am ready.

I give the barest tilt of my head in return.

I know.

The band changes songs. Waiters glide past with trays of champagne. The auctioneer is doing his warm-up patter at the far end of the room. On the surface, the evening is flawless.

Underneath, I can feel a hum. A wrongness. It starts small: one of Papa’s men near the doors touching his earpiece, his jaw tightening. Another, at the far side of the room, suddenly very still. The pattern shifts, and I don’t know how I know, but I know.

Something is happening.

My father’s absence presses heavier on my ribs.

They should have been here by now.

He promised, this afternoon, with his hand on my back and pride in his eyes. *“We’ll be late, perhaps. There’s a meeting I cannot miss. But we will come. I want to see my angel shine.”*

They are not here to see it.

I make my way toward the French doors to the terrace. I tell myself I need air. I tell myself it’s because the ballroom is hot, the air thick with perfume and money and lies. I don’t admit—even inside my own head—that I’m following the tension coiling in my gut like wire.

The crowd parts for me effortlessly. People step aside without thinking. I am untouchable.

Sienna Romano. The Angel of the Five Families.

A title I despise.

The cool night air is a relief against my flushed skin. The city stretches out below, a tapestry of glittering lights. Beautiful from up here. Distant. Clean.

I lean against the cold stone balustrade and close my eyes, letting the sound of traffic far below wash over me. For a moment, I imagine just…walking away. Down the side stairs, into a cab, disappearing into the blur of taillights.

I once asked Papa why he never let me sit in on the meetings. I was twenty-two, fresh out of business school with a master’s degree I had earned with honors.

He’d laughed. Patted my head like I was a golden retriever.

“Sienna, my sweet girl,” he said, his voice laced with that infuriating, gentle affection. “Your hands are not meant for holding weapons. They are for holding champagne glasses.”

My hands grip the balustrade now, my knuckles white.

He thinks my mind is the same as my hands. Soft. Delicate. Unsuited for the darkness his world is built upon.

He is wrong.

They have no idea the things I see, the connections I make. They don’t know that I was the one who spotted the discrepancy in the shipping manifests two years ago that led to them discovering an embezzler in their ranks. I pointed it out to Lorenzo, our family’s consigliere, who quietly told my father.

Papa praised Matteo for his sharp eye.

Matteo, who can’t even balance his own checkbook.

I said nothing. I just smiled and planned the Christmas ball.

That’s the game I play. I am the ghost in their machine. The silent observer. I see the rot in our foundations, the cracks in our alSiennances, the enemies who smile at our table.

And I say nothing.

Because the Don has two sons. The succession is clear. There is no place for a daughter in that world.

A shift in the air behind me makes the tiny hairs on the back of my neck rise.

I don’t need to turn around. I know his presence. His quiet energy. His absolute stillness.

“Luca,” I say, without opening my eyes.

“Sienna.”

His voice is wrong.

Luca’s voice is usually steady, even when I’m not. Tonight, for the ten years he’s been by my side, through teenage tantrums and society scandals, it has been the one constant line of calm through every storm.

Now it’s frayed. Thin.

I open my eyes and turn.

The look on his face steals the air from my lungs. His expression is never anything but a carefully constructed mask of neutrality. That mask is gone. His face is pale, his eyes wide with something I have never seen in them before.

Horror.

“What is it?” My heart starts a frantic, heavy rhythm against my ribs. “What’s happened?”

He takes a step closer. Behind him, through the glass, I see the ballroom: glitter, light, laughter. No one out there knows that anything is wrong yet.

Luca’s jaw works. His mouth opens and closes once, twice. Luca is never at a loss for words. He doesn’t use many, but when he does, they are always precise. Chosen.

“Tell me,” I say, my voice low and sharp. The hostess persona evaporates under the sheer terror rolling off him. “Now.”

“There was an incident,” he says finally, the words scraped out of his throat. He glances back toward the ballroom, as if worried we can be overheard despite the glass and the music.

“An incident?” Cold dread coils in my stomach. “Is it Papa? Matteo? Gianni? They’re late. Did something happen with the meeting?”

“Your father,” Luca says. His voice cracks on the word. “He left the meeting downtown twenty minutes ago. On the way here.”

My mind races. Routes. Convoys. Security protocols.

“What about him?” I demand. “Did someone hit the convoy? Is he at a hospital? Which one?”

Luca shakes his head slowly.

“It wasn’t an accident,” he says.

The air seems to thicken around us. The city noise fades to a dull, distant roar.

“And your brothers,” he continues, voice barely a whisper. “They were already on the move from the house. Separate route. Separate detail.”

“No.” The word is a puff of air, too small to hold the scale of my denial. “No. They have security. They have armored cars. They are never without their men.”

I am reciting facts, building a wall of logic between myself and what I see in his eyes.

“It was coordinated,” Luca says, his tone flattening out, like he’s forcing it into something he can control. “Professional. Both convoys were hit within the same minute. Blocking vehicles, explosives. Security was neutralized at both locations.”

I stare at him. At his shattered expression. At the cracks in the world I thought I understood.

To hit the Don and both his heirs nearly simultaneously…it would have to be an inside job. Someone who knew their schedules. Their routes. Their security protocols.

My analytical mind keeps working, even as everything else inside me begins to tilt.

“Where are they?” I ask. My voice sounds strange to my own ears, like it’s coming from down a hallway. “Are they at the hospital? Tell me which one, we’ll go—”

Luca finally meets my gaze fully. And in his eyes, I see the answer.

There is no hope there.

Only devastation.

He doesn’t need to say the words.

But he does.

“They’re gone, Sienna.”

Something inside my chest lurches, then clamps down so hard I can’t breathe.

He reaches out as if to steady me, but I am frozen, locking my knees, fingers digging into the stone rail.

“All three convoys are confirmed,” Luca says hoarsely. “Your father. Matteo. Gianni. No survivors.”

I drag in a breath that feels like glass.

The Don. The heirs.

“The police will be on it soon,” he continues quietly. “The other Families will move even sooner. This gala…” His gaze flicks toward the shining room beyond the glass. “This is a target now. We have to get you out before anyone here realizes what’s happened.”

The words swim around me. The city lights blur, smeared streaks of color.

My home. My life. Everything I have ever known.

Gone.

I force my lips to move. “Does anyone else know?”

“Lorenzo.” Luca swallows. “Some of the inner circle. They’re already securing the estate. We go there. Now.”

The urge to crumble, to scream, to fall to my knees and sob until my throat is raw, crashes into me like a wave.

I don’t move.

The fortress holds.

“Then let’s go,” I say. My voice is low, scraped smaller than it was an hour ago, but it doesn’t shake. “Get me out of here, Luca.”

He nods once, relief and grief warring in his eyes.

“Yes, signorina.”

He steps in close, his arm a solid line of strength at my back as he guides me away from the rail and toward the doors.

Behind the glass, the gala continues, crystal and laughter, music and money, blissfully unaware that the world on which it rests has just been blown to pieces.

As we disappear into the shadows at the edge of the ballroom, I hear my father’s voice again in my head, warm and proud.

“Your mother would have been so proud.”

My perfect gilded cage is gone.

All that’s left is the fall.