Page 1 of Once Upon a Lie

Prologue

Valentina

Saturday, November 6

8:00 p.m.

When your father used to be in the mob, you learn early that fairy tales aren’t for girls like you.

You don’t grow up dreaming about castles or princes or becoming a Disney princess. You grow up learning to read rooms, to avoid questions, and to never trust the wrong smile.

I was still missing my two front teeth the first time reality cracked the illusion of childhood clean in half.

At six years old, while I sat in a Brooklyn elementary school classroom with pink sparkle shoes on my feet and crayon under my fingernails, Anthony Marino slid a note onto my desk via peanut-butter-and-jelly-sticky fingers as Miss Redwood showed us how to draw a triangle on the chalkboard.

my dad wunts 2 kill ur dad

I could barely read back then, Anthony’s handwriting wasn’t good at all, but the doodle of a stick figure holding a gun next to the words did all the heavy lifting.

I took it home and showed it to my mom. She promptly went pale as a ghost and showed it to my dad, who, well, got angry. Not like irritated angry, but white-hot anger that showed in every line and vein of his face. And when my brother, Nico, found out about the note—always playing the role of my overprotective older brother—he threatened to beat Anthony Marino’s ass.

I didn’t understand it then, but I do now.

Anthony’s dad was mob. And my dad was mob too.

Technically, half the dads at Sacred Heart Elementary had illicit connections they didn’t know their kids were listening in on from time to time.

After that, I started to pay attention. I started to notice that my dad didn’t go to work in the morning like other kids’ dads did. He didn’t carry a briefcase, and he wasn’t a doctor or dentist or banker. And whenever he had to leave the house for “work,” he never explained where he was actually going.

And trust me, I asked. A lot.

“Where are you going, Daddy?”

“But isn’t it time for bed?”

“Can I come with you, Daddy?”

His answer was always the same back then: “Business, sweetheart. Grown-up business.”

And then there were the frequent barbecues.

Everyone in attendance was my and Nico’s uncle or aunt even though they held no blood relation to us. The men never stood around a grill cooking up hot dogs and hamburgers, but they checked their watches a lot. They checked the street even more. And all the women, including my mother, focused on the food and the kids, keeping their distance from whatever it was the men were discussing.

A year after Anthony gave me that note, his dad was killed. His mother took him and his older brother Michael out of Sacred Heart Elementary School, and I never saw him again.

That was the day my innocence broke. To this day, I still wonder if my father had something to do with it.

The summer before I turned eight, my dad got out of “the life”—nearly an impossibility in fictional stories and a dangerous endeavor at its best in the real world. He moved me, Nico, and my mom from the East Coast to Tennessee, and we started over completely. Our last name changed from Greco to Cordone overnight—severing us from the Greco Crime Family completely.

New names. New life. New rules.

We never looked back, and no one ever came looking for us. At least, not as far as I know.

My father, now Tommy Cordone, put all his energy into building a clean and legitimate business empire. And Cordone Freight rose up like a shield until the past became exactly that—the past.

After several years of watching my father grow his overwhelmingly successful business, it felt like we were finally safe. Ordinary. Just like everyone else. And the idea of fairy tales and riding off into the sunset with the man of my dreams started to feel like . . . maybe it could happen to a girl like me.

My life in Nashville felt as close to sunshine and rainbows as I could’ve ever imagined for myself, and I guess you could say I started to let my guard down a little too much.