Chapter 1

I Was Just a Fake Face

Rain hammered the bulletproof glass in sharp, cracking bursts.

New York at night — the kind of rain that shreds the dark into pieces.

I sat in the back of a black Maybach. The cabin was cold as a meat locker. No lights.

I raised my hand.

Black leather gloves wrapped my fingers as I traced slowly along my jawline.

Real bone beneath real skin. Warm.

Six years ago, this was where the blade went in.

Antonio had both hands on my shoulders, bearing down with everything he had. Hard enough to feel the shoulder blade flexing.

He was my biological father.

"Hold her still! Don't let her move!" He screamed it at the surgeon.

The scalpel opened the skin.

Blood welled up and ran from the corner of my eye into my eye socket. The whole world went red.

I shook so hard my teeth clicked together. I pressed my lips tight and begged him. "Dad — it hurts — please stop —"

"Shut up." Antonio slapped me across the face. "For the Moretti family, you will become her."

No inflection. No hesitation. He looked at me the way you look at livestock before slaughter.

The surgeon worked with needle and thread, pressing a silicone mask — the face of a dead heiress — into my raw flesh and sewing it in.

Every stitch landed directly on a nerve.

That was how I became a ceasefire hostage. A gift to the Callahan family. A gift to their Boss, Declan.

During the years I spent with the Callahans, I lived like a human shield.

I took three bullets for Declan.

The first punched through my left shoulder. The second grazed the carotid. The third buried itself in my chest one centimeter from my heart.

The surgeon dug for the third bullet with forceps while I ground my back molars to powder. I couldn't even scream. Declan stood at the bedside, running a thumb along my cheek — along a dead woman's cheekbones.

He stared at that borrowed face and bent down and kissed my forehead, like a man distributing charity.

I told myself it was love.

I wagged my tail like a dog losing its mind.

I wanted him to see through the mask. To find Evelyn underneath — the real Evelyn, the one bleeding and scarred and desperate. I was stupid enough to believe that if I gave him enough blood, if I handed him my life, he would eventually give me something real.

I was wrong. Completely, catastrophically wrong.

The night the threat was neutralized, it rained exactly like this.

Declan sat at the head of the main hall, sprawled in the leather chair. A new woman was tucked against him — someone he'd brought home that day.

She pouted and pointed at me. "Declan, her face looks so stiff. It's disgusting."

I was on my knees on the floor, pressing a hand against a chest wound that had split open again, looking up at him.

Declan didn't bother to lift his eyes. He exhaled a slow lungful of cigar smoke, voice cold enough to frost glass.

"It's just a fake face. When it's dead, we order another."

He flicked his hand.

Four bodyguards came at me. They planted boots on my spine and drove my face into the carpet.

Rough hands found the edge of the silicone mask.

And pulled.

"AHHH—"

Skin tore. The mask came away with it — my real dermis still attached to the edges, ripped clean off half my face. Pale white showing underneath.

The pain went straight through my skull. I clawed at the carpet until every fingernail peeled back. No sound came out.

Declan swirled his glass and told his men to parade the remains of my face around the room.

The hall erupted in laughter.

My biological father Antonio was in that crowd. My brother Marco stood right beside him.

They were clapping. Holding champagne flutes and applauding.

"A fake is a fake! Should have known better than to soil Mr. Callahan's eyes with it!"

The pain convulsed through me in waves. My stomach turned over. Blood sealed my eyes shut.

I dragged myself upright, pushed through the bodyguards, and ran.

Behind me: whistles and insults and laughter.

I went headfirst into the East River.

The cold hit like a wall of knives. Water forced itself into the wound, into every nerve ending, into my lungs. The air was crushed out of me completely. The icy current drowned the last remnant of the girl who had ever wanted family or love.

"Your Honor."

The bodyguard's low voice from the front seat cut the memory clean.

I opened my eyes.

The window glass gave me back my own reflection.

Clear. Complete. No surgical seams. No borrowed face pressed over mine.

No warmth, either.

I studied myself in the glass. Eyes flat.

"We've arrived at the InterContinental," the bodyguard said, turning his head. "The Moretti and Callahan delegations are already seated."

I looked down.

Long fingers smoothed the creases from my black coat, slow and unhurried.

"Let's go."

The door opened.

Two columns of black-clad guards dropped to one knee in unison. Black umbrellas snapped open overhead, a ceiling of silk against the driving rain.

Six years of hell. Finished.

Tonight, it was their turn.