No One Could Tame the Mafia Boss’s Violent Son—Until the Waitress He Humiliated Became the Only Woman Brave Enough to Save His Life and Break His Heart

PART 2

One hour down. Only the rest of her life to survive.

That was what Sienna Brooks told herself as she stood in Dawson Moretti’s penthouse, listening to the shower run, having somehow, in a single morning, convinced the most violent man in Chicago to drink coffee instead of whiskey before an eleven o’clock meeting.

She did not understand yet why he listened to her. She would not understand it for a long time. But Vittorio Moretti had been right about one thing: his son, who respected no one, feared no one, obeyed no one, who had gone through twelve bodyguards in six months, sat down when Sienna told him to sit, and dried off when she handed him a rag, and drank tap water when she said he didn’t deserve bubbles.

It was not attraction, not at first, though that would come, complicated and dangerous, later. It was something stranger. Dawson Moretti had spent his entire life surrounded by people who were afraid of him, who flattered him, who flinched. Fear was the only language anyone spoke to him. And then a waitress had dumped a bucket of ice water over his head and called him a toddler throwing a tantrum, and she had not been afraid, and somewhere in his violent, broken, liquor-soaked heart, that absence of fear had landed like a key turning in a lock he didn’t know he had.

Over the following weeks, Sienna did the job Vittorio had hired her for, though it was unlike any job description ever written. She managed Dawson. Not with force, which had never worked on him, and not with fear, which he fed on, but with the one thing no one had ever offered him: honest, unflinching expectation that he could be better than he was.

When he reached for a bottle, she told him he was stronger than that, and oddly, he believed her. When he was cruel to someone, she told him cruelty was the coward’s version of strength, and he flinched as if struck. When he raged, she did not cower, and her refusal to cower somehow drained the rage of its power.

It was not that she was never afraid. She was afraid constantly, in the early weeks, working for the most violent man in Chicago, alone with him in his penthouse, knowing what his family was and what he was capable of. But she had learned something during fourteen-hour shifts and three-days-late rent and a father whose debts had put men outside her building: fear was a luxury she could not afford to show. She had been swallowing her fear and standing her ground her whole life, against landlords and creditors and her father’s dangerous mistakes. Dawson Moretti was just one more thing to stand her ground against, larger and more dangerous than the rest, but not different in kind. So she swallowed the fear, and she stood, and she held him to a standard no one had ever held him to, and slowly, impossibly, he began to rise to meet it.

She learned, slowly, where the violence came from. Dawson Moretti had been raised by Vittorio, the butcher of Chicago, raised on violence and polished into something beautiful enough to be mistaken for civilized. He had been taught, from infancy, that the world was prey and weakness was death and the only way to be safe was to be feared. He had never, in twenty-seven years, been shown another way to exist.

There was a particular evening, weeks in, that changed something between them. Dawson had come home from a meeting that had gone badly, his knuckles bloodied again, his eyes black with the old rage. Sienna had expected the penthouse to become dangerous. Instead, when she looked at him, she saw past the rage for the first time, to the exhausted, hollow thing underneath it, and instead of confronting him, she simply said, quietly, “Sit down. Let me look at your hands.” And he had. He had sat down and let her clean and bandage his bloodied knuckles, and he had not said a word, and when she was done, he had looked at her with an expression she had never seen on him before. Bewilderment. As if no one in his entire life had ever tended to his wounds instead of either causing them or fearing them.

Sienna showed him another way. Not gently, not softly, but honestly, the way you’d talk to anyone you actually believed could change.

And Dawson, to the astonishment of everyone in the Moretti world, began to change.