Her Family Put Her in the Laundry Room for Christmas, but They Never Expected Her Mafia Boss to Find Out

While warmth and Scotch flowed on the forty-fourth floor of the Vale Tower, twelve miles west in the suburb of Elmhurst, the Marino family home felt like a tomb that had been violently desecrated.

The front door slammed so hard that the decorative evergreen wreath hanging on the frosted glass tilted sideways and fell to the porch floor with a dull thud.

"I have never been so humiliated in my entire miserable life!" Natalie shrieked, kicking off her four-hundred-dollar designer heels into the hallway baseboard. One of the heels chipped against the wood, but she didn't even look at it. "In front of the Hendersons! In front of Kenneth’s partners! The girl at the front desk looked at Kenneth like he was a vagrant! 'I’m sorry, Mr. Miller, but this card has been flagged for non-payment!' In front of sixty people, Kenneth!"

Kenneth Miller stomped into the hallway behind her, his tuxedo bow tie undone, his face pale and slick with cold sweat. "Shut up, Natalie! Just shut the hell up! You think I care about your stupid country club party?! My partners just called an emergency board meeting for tomorrow morning! They’re freezing my accounts! Do you understand what that means? We don't have money for the mortgage next month, let alone your damn dresses!"

"Don't you yell at my daughter in this house!" Frank Marino roared, emerging from the kitchen. He had his reading glasses pushed up on his bald head, his shirt unbuttoned at the collar, clutching a stack of papers printed from his home office computer. His hands were shaking violently. "We have bigger problems than your country club! Apex Harbor called in my balloon payment! Four hundred and fifty thousand dollars! Due in twenty days! If I don't produce the liquid capital, they’re seizing the trucks, Kenneth! The entire fleet!"

Rose Marino sat at the dining room table, her face buried in her hands, weeping loudly.

The house was cold. In the chaos of the afternoon, no one had remembered to turn up the thermostat. The dining table, which was supposed to be laden with the lavish, seven-course traditional Christmas Eve feast Valerie always prepared, was completely bare except for an empty pizza box and two half-empty bottles of cheap red wine.

In the living room, Natalie’s four children—ages four through nine—were running wild, screaming, fighting over a tablet, and knocking over ornaments from the poorly decorated Christmas tree. The four-year-old, Noah, was crying hysterically in the corner because he had dropped his juice box onto the cream-colored carpet, and no one was there to clean it up.

"Where is she?!" Rose sobbed, lifting her tear-streaked face. "How could Valerie do this to us?! She’s our daughter! She works for that monster! She’s the one who handles the accounts! She could stop this with one phone call!"

"She blocked us, Mom!" Natalie screamed, pacing the dining room like a caged animal. "She had us thrown out of the building! She let that... that criminal stand there and threaten us! She doesn't care if we lose everything!"

"Call her from a different phone," Frank demanded, slamming his fist onto the mahogany table so hard the wine glasses rattled. "Use your phone, Kenneth! She doesn't have your work cell blocked, does she?"

"I tried three times in the car, Frank!" Kenneth shouted back, running his hands through his thinning hair. "It goes straight to an automated corporate intercept! Her personal line has been disconnected or rerouted through Vale’s encrypted exchange! We can't reach her!"

"Then we go to her apartment," Rose said, standing up suddenly, her maternal delusion flaring back to life with desperate fury. "We drive to Lincoln Park. She’s my daughter! I carried her for nine months! She cannot abandon her flesh and blood on Christmas Eve! She’s sitting in her cozy apartment while her family is being destroyed! We go there, Frank. We make her see reason!"

"The roads are closed, Rose!" Frank yelled, gesturing wildly toward the front window where the snow was drifting against the glass, nearly three feet deep. "The police have issued a travel ban across Cook County! We barely made it back from the country club without putting the SUV into a ditch!"

"I don't care!" Rose cried, her voice cracking into high-pitched hysteria. "If we don't fix this tonight, Frank, what happens tomorrow?! What happens on Christmas morning?! What do we tell the kids?! There are no presents wrapped! The dinner isn't cooked! The caterers won't come! Everything is ruined!"

Natalie stopped pacing. She looked at the bare dining room table. She looked toward the hallway that led down to the finished basement—the laundry room where, twelve hours ago, she had casually tossed an uninflated air mattress and a scratchy wool blanket.

*“Put her downstairs,”* she had said so flippantly that morning. *“Then she’ll hear Noah if he wakes up.”*

For the first time, a cold, sickening realization clawed its way into Natalie’s chest.

Valerie had always been there.

When Natalie had her first child, Valerie was the one who spent two weeks sleeping on the nursery floor so Natalie could rest. When Frank’s previous business went under eight years ago, Valerie was the one who gave up her savings to keep the bank from taking the family home. When Rose had knee surgery, Valerie took two weeks of unpaid leave to bathe her, cook for her, and manage her physical therapy.

They had never paid her back. They had never even said thank you. They had simply absorbed her sacrifices like water into dry sand, convincing themselves that Valerie didn't mind—that Valerie was born to serve them.

And now, the foundation had walked away.

And the entire house was falling on their heads.

"She’s not at her apartment," Natalie whispered, her voice suddenly trembling, all the fake bravado draining out of her.

Frank frowned, wiping sweat from his forehead. "What are you talking about?"

"She’s not at her apartment in Lincoln Park," Natalie repeated, her eyes wide with mounting horror. "Did you see how Dominic Vale stood in front of her today? Did you see the way he looked at her?"

Rose frowned through her tears. "What does that have to do with anything? He’s her employer!"

"He’s not just her employer, Mom!" Natalie yelled, her voice breaking. "No billionaire CEO flies down to his private security lobby to defend a mid-level analyst from her mother! He knew my husband’s loan details by heart! He knew Dad’s balloon payment dates! Valerie didn't just quit our family... she’s with *him*."

Silence dropped over the Marino household, heavy, suffocating, and terrifying.

Frank sank into a chair, the color completely leaving his face. "If she’s with Vale... if she told Vale about the debts..."

"He’s going to destroy us," Kenneth whispered from the doorway, his eyes hollow. "He’s going to take the house, Frank. He’s going to take your business, he’s going to take my firm, and he’s going to leave us with nothing."

From the living room, little Noah began to scream louder, his cries echoing through the empty, cold house.