Chapter 3

Her Trophy

Declan's eyes passed right over Marco screaming on the floor and locked onto my black veil.

He didn't glance at the blood. His custom shoes stepped directly over Marco's shattered knee without adjusting their stride.

Marco's howl spiked. Antonio clamped both hands over his own mouth, shaking hard enough to rattle his cufflinks, not daring to produce a single sound.

Declan steered Victoria toward the head of the round table and pulled out the chair.

"Sit down," he said.

The heads of the Five Families sat without a word.

I took my place at the far end of the long table as the "Tribunal Envoy," watching him through the veil.

Declan bit down on a cigar. Someone struck a match before he could ask for one. In the flare of the flame he narrowed his eyes and scanned toward me again.

His gaze paused on my silhouette for two full seconds. A slight furrow between his brows — a flicker of something unresolved — then a dismissive exhale, a slow billow of smoke.

He didn't recognize me.

The stand-in he'd used and discarded didn't deserve a permanent address in his memory.

Victoria arranged herself across Declan's lap and smiled at the room with the deliberate brightness of a woman planting a flag. She needed this table — the highest-level underground gathering in the country — to understand who sat at the top.

She reached into a limited-edition Hermès Himalayan crocodile clutch and produced a square transparent specimen box. She set it on the marble with a solid, deliberate knock.

The overhead light hit the glass directly.

Inside, suspended in pale yellow preservative fluid, was half a human face.

The silicone edges still had dried, blackened flesh clinging to them.

My face.

The mask Declan had personally ordered removed from my skin six years ago, with pliers and a scalpel.

"This is what Declan personally peeled off his little counterfeit." Victoria's crimson nails tapped the glass. "The fake who tried to pass herself off as a real heiress died too fast to be any real fun. I had someone preserve this piece as a keepsake."

Three seconds of dead silence around the table.

Then laughter — the performed, calibrated kind that exists purely to demonstrate loyalty to the Callahans.

Every family head joined in. Even Antonio, still on the floor, twisted his face into a groveling smile.

"Madam is absolutely right!" Antonio crowed, apparently having forgotten his son was still bleeding nearby. "That shameless bastard girl — being the madam's specimen is the greatest honor her miserable life could produce!"

Marco, face pressed against the marble, managed a slurred addition through the blood in his mouth. "She was garbage... got exactly what she deserved..."

I stared at the warped, preserved skin inside the glass.

The phantom ache moved through the three spots in my chest where the bullets had gone in, years ago.

Declan flicked ash off his cigar.

He didn't even look at the box.

"An irrelevant stand-in." He leaned back in the chair, fingers moving idly through Victoria's hair. "Vicky, don't dirty the negotiating table with trash."

Trash.

I had taken his bullets. I had bled his blood. I had been stripped and thrown into a frozen river.

In his mouth: trash. Dirtying his table.

Beneath the gloves, my fingers pressed into my own palms until the nails nearly pierced the leather.

Victoria, emboldened, picked up the specimen box and shoved it hard along the marble surface toward me.

The glass base scraped and shrieked across the stone and came to rest directly in front of my place.

The preservative sloshed. The half-face pressed flat against the inside of the glass.

Victoria lifted her chin.

"Envoy." Her voice was sweet and precise. "You haven't said a word all evening. Does the Callahan family's trophy not meet your standards?"

Every eye at the table swung to me.

Antonio shot me frantic looks from the floor, begging me not to antagonize Declan.

Declan held his cigar and watched from the head of the table with the lazy contempt of someone who has never once been surprised by anything.

I looked at the chunk of skin behind the glass. The dried flesh at the silicone edges.

I stood up slowly.

My left hand found the edge of the right glove.

And pulled it off.