The dog bowl was still warm from the kitchen when I set it down in front of her. Leftover eggs. Torn pieces of toast. Something that had once been bacon, floating in cold grease.

Emma was only three, but children learn the language of survival faster than adults think. She did not raise her voice. She did not run to me like children in commercials do. She looked at Lucy, the maid, as if asking for permission to be loved by her own father.

I knelt on the cold marble floor. The marble was imported from Italy, a gift Bianca had requested six months ago to replace the original mahogany flooring. It looked clean, expensive, and completely devoid of life.

"Emma," I said softly, stripping away every drop of coldness in my tone. "Look at me, sweetheart."

She turned her dark eyes toward me. She had her mother’s eyes—not Bianca’s, but my late wife’s. Clara had died giving birth to her, leaving me with a empire to run and a hole in my heart that I had stupidly tried to plug with Bianca’s charming smile and high-society background.

I gently lifted the sleeve of Emma’s cardigan.

There, stamped against her pale skin, were small, purple dots. The size of a thumb.

"One," I whispered, counting under my breath.

I rolled the sleeve higher. Two. Three. Four.

Bianca stood up so fast her chair screeched against the marble. "Vittorio, this is ridiculous! She plays in the garden. She falls down! Children get bruised. You are listening to the hysterical claims of a maid I was planning to fire today anyway!"

Lucy didn't flinch. She kept her arms wrapped around Emma, her knuckles white. "She didn't fall, Mr. Vittorio. Every morning when you left for the shipyard at five, Miss Bianca would take little Emma to the sunroom. If Emma made noise while Miss Bianca was on the phone with her mother... or with Mr. Marcus..."

"Watch your tongue, woman!" Marcus barked, taking a step forward from the map rack. His posture was stiff, his hand resting instinctively near his jacket pocket.

I didn't turn around. I didn't need to. "Marcus," I said quietly. "If you take another step toward this child, you won't leave this estate on your feet."

Marcus froze. He knew what I had built before I became a respectable shipping tycoon. He knew the men who owed me favors in the harbor district.

I continued rolling up Emma's sleeves, then gently lifted the back of her shirt.

Eleven bruised marks in total. Eleven distinct pinches. Eleven warnings for a three-year-old girl not to ruin the new lady of the house’s quiet mornings.

"Eleven mornings," I said, my voice dangerously smooth. "I was in the harbor for eleven days straight negotiating the East Coast line. Eleven mornings you touched my daughter."

"She was undisciplined!" Bianca spat out, her polished composure cracking wide open. The sweet, refined woman I had married was gone; in her place was a bitter, grasping stranger. "She cried constantly! She ruined my porcelain sets! She kept asking for Clara! Clara is dead, Vittorio! I am the woman of this house now!"

"Not anymore," I said.

I pulled out my phone and dialed a three-digit extension. The line picked up on the first ring.

"Geno," I said into the receiver. "Bring the team to the main dining room. And bring the safe keys."