1048 When the Cold-Hearted Mafia Boss Hired a Plus-Size Governess to Tame His Orphaned Twins, He Never Expected Her to Unlock the Safe He Kept Locked After His Wife's Murder—or That Refusing to Leave Would Force Him to Choose Between His Empire and His Family

The following morning, the tension in the breakfast room was thick enough to slice with a butter knife.

Marciano sat at the far end of the twelve-seat mahogany table, scrolling through his tablet while a cup of black coffee steamed untouched beside his hand. He rarely ate breakfast with his daughters; his presence usually turned the meal into a silent exercise in military discipline.

Gia picked at her eggs with a silver fork, her eyes darting between her father and Beatrice, who sat midway down the table.

“Miss Hale,” Marciano said without looking up from his screen. His voice was a low, resonant baritone that commanded the room effortlessly. “Harold tells me you’ve been wandering the west wing.”

Beatrice set her toast down. She didn’t flinch, nor did she rush to defend herself.

“I wasn’t wandering, Mr. Bellfort. I was looking for the secondary library catalog. The first-floor inventory is missing several volumes on nineteenth-century American history.”

Marciano finally looked up. His pale eyes pinned her to her chair. “The west wing is private.”

“So I gathered from the state of the locks,” she replied smoothly. “Though if you’re trying to keep historical texts from being read, locking them behind three deadbolts seems counterproductive.”

Gia let out a sudden, sharp snort of amusement, quickly covering her mouth with a napkin. Frankie didn’t look up from her plate, but her shoulders tightened.

Marciano’s gaze hardened. He leaned forward slightly, resting his forearms on the table. “You have a remarkably casual way of speaking to people who sign your checks, Miss Hale.”

“And you have a remarkably suspicious way of looking at people who are simply trying to teach your children,” Beatrice countered, her own gray eyes meeting his without wavering. “If you’d prefer a governess who nods, smiles, and pretends not to notice when a house is half-empty of joy, I can pack my suitcase right now. I’m sure the agency has someone on standby who specializes in polite irrelevance.”

The silence that followed was absolute. Even the house manager, standing near the sideboard, held his breath.

Marciano studied her—really studied her—taking in the fullness of her frame, the quiet defiance in her posture, and the complete absence of the nervous flutter he was accustomed to seeing in employees who crossed him.

“Finish your breakfast,” Marciano said coldly, standing up so abruptly his chair scraped sharply against the floorboards. “And stay out of the west wing.”

He didn’t look at his daughters as he walked out of the room. The heavy oak doors swung shut behind him with a dull thud.

Gia dropped her fork. “You’re going to be fired before Friday.”

“Probably,” Beatrice said calmly, taking a sip of her tea. “But the toast is quite good, so I’m going to finish it first.”

Later that afternoon, while Gia was practicing her piano pieces with a ferocious, angry rhythm that sounded more like an assault on the keys than a Beethoven sonata, Beatrice found Frankie sitting on the wide stone bench outside the mudroom.

The autumn wind was picking up, stripping the last brilliant red leaves from the maples.

Beatrice stepped outside, holding out a paper cup filled with hot apple cider she had begged from Mrs. Gable. She didn’t speak; she simply sat down on the other end of the bench, placing the cup between them.

Frankie stared at it for a long time before wrapping her cold fingers around the warmth.

“He hates it when people go in there,” Frankie said quietly, her breath pluming in the chill air.

“The west wing?”

“Mom’s studio.” Frankie’s voice was barely a whisper. “After she died, Dad locked the door and threw the key in the lake. Or at least, that’s what the staff whispers when they think we’re asleep.”

Beatrice’s chest tightened. So it wasn’t just old coats. It was a shrine—or a tomb.

“You miss her,” Beatrice said gently.

“I don’t remember her,” Frankie said, and the absolute flatness of the statement broke something inside Beatrice. “Gia says she remembers the smell of her perfume, but I think Gia just makes it up so Dad will look at her.”

Beatrice shifted closer, wrapping an arm around the girl’s rigid shoulders. For a second, Frankie stiffened, as if preparing to push away or build a wall. But the cold was biting, and the warmth of Beatrice’s side was steady, undeniable, and entirely unpretentious. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Frankie leaned in.

“Grief does strange things to families, Frankie,” Beatrice said softly, looking out over the manicured lawns toward the dark iron gates. “Especially when the person left behind thinks that if he stops moving for even a second, the whole world will collapse.”

“He doesn't love us,” Frankie murmured.

“He loves you,” Beatrice corrected firmly. “He just doesn't know how to do it without building a fortress around you. And a fortress is a very lonely place to grow up.”

That evening, after the girls were asleep, Beatrice sat at her small desk in the guest room with her laptop open. She wasn’t looking up recipes or lesson plans.

She was looking into Bellfort Industrial Systems.

And more specifically, into the highway accident that had taken Serena Bellfort’s life four years ago.

The public records were clean—almost too clean. A tragic winter storm, black ice on Route 9W, a single-vehicle collision into a concrete bridge abutment at 2:00 a.m.

Except Beatrice’s eyes caught a small, buried local news brief from three days after the funeral.

An independent freight truck registered to a shell company in Albany had been impounded near the scene, then quietly released without charges due to “insufficient evidence of structural involvement.”

The owner of that shell company?

A holding firm directly tied to a rival logistics syndicate that Marciano Bellfort had been quietly trying to crush for over a decade.

Beatrice stared at the screen, the breath catching in her throat.

It wasn't just a tragic accident during a snowstorm.