The Principessa They Called a Whore
The entrance to the apartment building was completely blocked. I shoved my way to the front just as Troy Valachi, son of a local Gallo family Capo, pointed me out and let out a vulgar whistle.
"Check her out. The art department's charity case. A total gold digger. They say she'll spread her legs for any rich old geezer."
Inside my apartment, my paintings had been slashed to ribbons. On the walls, scrawled in lurid red lipstick, were the words "SLUT" and "GET OUT OF CHICAGO."
Tiffany Monroe, the most popular girl on campus, held up her phone for her audience.
"Girls, I really didn't want to expose her, but she's just too foul," she said, her voice dripping with disdain. "Worse than some back-alley whore. On Monday, she was with that man in the Bentley at some five-star restaurant."
"Wednesday, she was clinging to a middle-aged guy at the opera, the kind who stinks of cigars and looks like he wants to devour you. And yesterday? It was that gentleman in the Rolls-Royce with the gold-rimmed glasses, the one who looked so refined but had the eyes of a shark."
She shoved the photos in the faces of the girls huddled around her.
"Obviously, she's not here for a degree. She's here to collect sugar daddies."
Though the photos clearly showed me in those places, I couldn't reveal that the men with me were my overprotective brother, my volatile uncle, and my formidable granduncle.
They were the Don of the Scardoni family, its most ruthless Consigliere, and a patriarch who commanded a shadowy empire of wealth.
The men around me erupted in jeers, their leering eyes raking over my body.
"Hey, out-of-towner, what's your price for a night? I want a taste, too."
They had no idea that the men they imagined as my sugar daddies were, in fact, the last people on earth they could ever afford to cross.