After My Brother’s Girlfriend Tried to Extort 500,000 from Me, I Revealed I Was the Mafia Donna Chapter 01

After My Brother’s Girlfriend Tried to Extort 500,000 from Me, I Revealed I Was the Mafia Donna Chapter 01

I was about to leave the restaurant my brother Luca owned when the manager stopped me at the door.

“Excuse me, madam, you haven’t paid your bill yet.”

I stopped and looked at her. I didn’t recognise her. She was probably new and had no idea who I was.

I was dressed simply in a black cashmere coat that day. I had no one from the Family with me, and nothing on me that revealed my identity. In Chicago, some people only had to see that there was no convoy, no bodyguards, and no ring marking your status before deciding you had no power.

I had no intention of arguing with a manager I’d never met, so I said calmly, “Put it on Luca’s tab. He’ll know.”

The manager looked me up and down. She had clearly already decided I wasn’t worth taking seriously.

“Madam, this is a three-star restaurant. We don’t run tabs, and knowing the owner doesn’t mean you get special treatment.”

With that, she slid a printed bill across the counter towards me. I looked down.

One dinner: five hundred thousand dollars.

Cutlery maintenance fee: thirty thousand.

Private air-filtration fee: fifty thousand.

VIP emotional-care fee: one hundred thousand.

Below that was a long list of charges so absurd they were almost funny. I stared at the bill for two seconds, hardly believing what I was seeing.

Luca had opened this restaurant with Moretti Family funding, and he’d actually allowed the place to charge people for nonsense like this?

I looked up.

“I’m Luca’s sister. If he’s got a problem with that, he can tell me himself.”

The manager didn’t back down. Instead, she laughed.

“You? Don’t make me laugh. Those clothes look second-hand. You can practically smell them from here…”

People nearby had already started turning to look. She seemed to enjoy the attention, and deliberately raised her voice.

“I’ve seen your sort before. You hear the boss is young, loaded and somebody in the Family, and suddenly you think knowing him gets you into this circle. You honestly think calling yourself his sister means you eat for free?”

Her voice sharpened.

“Keep refusing to pay and see what happens. I can make you disappear tonight.”

…

That was the end of my politeness.

To outsiders, Luca had long been regarded as the presumed heir to the Moretti Family. I, on the other hand, rarely appeared in public.

The truth was that I controlled the Family’s ledgers, its legitimate businesses, its dockside networks, and most of the seats on the Family council. Yet all outsiders knew was that the Morettis had a daughter who almost never showed her face.

Plenty of people assumed women in Families like ours were meant to attend charity galas, accept whatever marriage the Family arranged for them, and stay well away from any real share of power. I’d grown used to that kind of prejudice years ago.

What I hadn’t expected was to face it one day inside a restaurant backed by my own Family.

I took out my phone and sent a message to my private secretary.

“Tell Marco I want everything on this manager within ten minutes. If Luca insists on keeping her, I’m pulling every bit of Family backing from this restaurant.”

After sending the message, I looked at her again.

“Last chance. Check who I am before you make this any worse.”

She laughed. There wasn’t a trace of hesitation in it. If anything, she looked as though she’d been waiting for this exact moment.

Then it hit me.

That five-hundred-thousand-dollar bill had never been a misunderstanding.

She’d done it on purpose.