Rosalie Fierri [Book #5]

Chapter 1

I'm supposed to be dead. And yet, here I am alive and well. I wish the same could be said for my mother and so many others who lost their lives to the gas leak explosion.

I was three years old when it happened. My mother was a housekeeper who worked for some rich man, whose name I can't remember.

Since she couldn't afford a babysitter, she would always bring me to work with her.

I still remember it like it was yesterday.

I was playing with the origami swans she'd always decorate the dining room table with when she scolded me for messing up her napkin craft.

I started to cry, because that was the first time she ever yelled at me. She sighed, crouched down to my level and apologized.

She then explained as best she could to my three year old self that she was just stressed about some important dinner her boss was having. And then afterwards, she kissed my cheek and told me she loved me.

Her smile was the last thing I saw before my world literally came crumbling down around me.

With no other kin remaining to care for me, I was left an orphan for most of my life. Occasionally hopping from shitty foster home to shitty foster home, I quickly learned that the only person I could rely on was myself.

Once I turned thirteen, I ran away from my foster home in search of my purpose. And while on this six month journey to find myself, my purpose ended up finding me fast asleep on a train with no particular destination in mind.

A man by the name of Maxwell Lastra, who I just call Max, took me in and cared for me as if I were his own. He became the father figure that I had longed for my entire life.

We became inseparable. There wasn't a thing he didn't know about me. But, it always felt like I knew very little about him. And I had been right.

I didn't find out what he really did for a living until I was sixteen years old. And it was then that I was introduced to the world of assassins.

I was a quick learner, my skills far more advanced than anyone Max had ever trained. I became an unstoppable killing machine. It had become my way out of the fire I should've died in.

I started making hundreds of thousands of dollars killing anyone and everyone Max assigned me. Whether they were criminals, average family men with a debt to owe, or people with a high ranked status, they all were met with the wrath of my sniper, Artemis.

But even with my newfound purpose I still felt as though something were missing from my life.

And once again, I had been right.

I had no intention of going through Max's things, but something in my gut told me that if I hadn't the void in my heart would never be filled.

That's when I discovered the file Max had been keeping on me since the day I was born. It contained information not only about me, my mother, and who my father was, but about the four older brothers I didn't know I had.

And the information didn't stop there. Apparently, my father, Giovanni Fierri was leader to the most notorious Mafia in all of Sicily and New York until he was murdered in cold blood by a man he thought was his friend.

His legacy was then passed down to his eldest son and my older brother, Marcellius Fierri. And to this day, Marcellius and my other brothers remain the most feared and respected among both their allies and enemies.

After confronting Max about keeping such valuable information from me, and lying to me about who I was since the day he met me, I left and never looked back.