1914. !
THEY SAY THE FIRST CASUALTY of war is innocence.
When she was five, she bit her oldest brother Alessandro for taking away her favourite doll - the one father brought her from London, with green and golden ribbons in her hair - and in the process ruining it as he and his friends thought it incredibly funny to gauge it's eyes out and dangle it in front of her window, scaring her witless with it.
Consumed by rage she left an imprint on his arm, so deep that the boy of eleven at the time sobbed uncontrollably all the while their mother stitched up the wound.
At eight she practiced her addition by counting the bottles of whiskey at her fathers warehouse by the canal. ( even later she was very best at numbers, soon enough taking over the overseeing of the shipments )
She broke Bessie Stone's nose at eleven for mocking her, saying she would end up a lawless, gangster hussy, just like her mother.
When Roberto Cardinale was called up by her teachers at St. Josephs to reprimand her, he found her grinning, happily showing off her newly chipped front tooth.
Oh I'll be a lawless hussy, alright, she had told him later while licking a gelato at one of their parlors, perfectly carefree as if she hadn't ruined the poor girls face, but she ain't going to call me that in the face, or I'll give her a third eye.
Beneath the façade of a spoiled teenager, red lipped smirks and ermine coats, brewed a chained tempest, an inherited bloodlust concealed by a pair of charming brown eyes, waiting for a moment to unleash the suffocating ambitions dancing around her head.
And it did come.
At her ripe age of eighteen, as Europe was plunged into the bloodiest war yet, the keys of an empire were passed into her hands.
As the three Cardinale Devils boarded the train headed to war zone, their enemies were not quite aware they left the very worst of them behind.
