Chapter One

Imperial Summons

Catherine Roman loves power and loves with power. When a bitter rival challenged Mrs. Roman’s authority, she put her life and mine at risk. And in the moment of crisis, she handed me the weapon that turned me into a killer and her eternal slave.

Mrs. Roman’s fierce, nearly black, eyes and high cheekbones thoroughly captivated me the first time I saw her, at a bankers’ meeting. The subtle slant of her eyelids spiced her beauty with exotic flavor. Although she was a dozen years my senior, I preferred one of Her Majesty’s withering glares to all of the smiles from thirty-something women my own age. Mrs. Roman’s five-foot-ten frame stretched her classic hourglass figure into sleekness and imbued her with the hauteur worthy of her role as a modern Catherine the Great.

Mrs. Roman seized control in our upstate New York town—her hometown and my adopted residence—when the board of directors named her acting chairman of Savings and Trust Bank to succeed her late husband. Peter Roman died of a heart attack one crisp October night in 2002. (“He wanted me to love him to death, and I did,” Mrs. Roman once told me—not as a boast, but as a melancholy fact.)

When Mrs. Roman commanded me to become her tool in January 2003, to do her dirty work while she took all of the credit, I eagerly capitulated. I thought I was accepting an invitation, but she preordained my fate. I was whipped. Go ahead and snicker. She actually used a whip, not just...

Not that I’m a wimp. My personality was “forged in the hills of Pittsburgh,” to quote a phrase that some flack at our bank, Federal National, put in a news release about me—once. But when Catherine the Great exerted her will, I was more like molten steel than steel beams.

Mrs. Roman called me at my office that fateful Wednesday afternoon in early January 2003 to issue her decree. At least part of me felt like a steel girder at the thought of surrendering to her cruelty. “Francis Prince,” she began our phone conversation. “Loved your speech at the Robert Morris conference.”

The local chapter of Robert Morris Associates, a national group fo