Chapter 4

Outside her window, the long black cars came and went through the Shaw gates the way they always did, headlights sliding across the wallpaper.

That night, someone left a small box outside her door.

Inside was a tray of butterfly pastries—her favorite. The kind you couldn’t buy inside the compound. He must have driven all the way into the city to get them.

She didn’t eat a single one.

She knew why he did it. Not because he loved her. Because her mother had taken him in when he was an orphan boy, fed him, raised him like a son. He was only trying to repay a debt.

She had always been a burden he tolerated out of gratitude.

*I’m done being that burden.*

The mission approval came through quickly. But her engagement cancellation was kept quiet—at her request.

She had asked the Don for that herself. She told her father to inform Mia privately, let Mia sign her own marriage contract with Ethan’s name on it.The rest of the family — the Consigliere, the Capo, the gossiping wives in the long-island houses — would not find out until the morning of the wedding itself, when Ethan Chase lifted the veil and saw the wrong face under it.

Every file the Shaw lawyers had built on Silas Price, every dossier on the Vossberg Cartel, every floor plan of his estate — she read once and burned in her own fireplace.

Consider it her wedding surprise to him.

Ethan, for his part, knew none of it.

He moved through the compound like a man with a stone tied to his chest. He pulled men off the rotation just to corner her father in his study. He took up smoking again, the way he hadn't since he was sixteen, and stubbed half the cigarettes out before they were done.

He went to the Don’s office every day, argued with anyone who would listen, begged for more time, another solution.

*Let me trade in for her. There has to be another way at Price.*

Rayna heard about it from the maids. She did not look up from her tea.

---

It was a clear, cold afternoon when she came out of the canteen and meet them in the garden pavilion.

Mia was sitting on the stone bench in a pale blue dress, her hands folded in her lap, the way she always sat when she wanted to look small. Ethan was bent over the table opposite her, sleeves pushed to the elbow, fingers working a tangle of dried grass into shape.

Mia was glowing. She had been told, then. She had been told she was going to marry him.

"Ethan." Mia asked, leaning over his hands. "What are you making? I've never seen you do that before."

Ethan's fingers moved without looking. Loop, twist, tuck.

"Nothing," he said. "Just some scrap."

Rayna stopped at the edge of the gravel path.

*Scrap.*

Her mother had taught him that *scrap.* On the long summer afternoons before the war between the families had bled into their own house, on the back porch of the old place, Rayna's mother had sat with a teenage boy who had come in off a Brooklyn curb with a black eye and no last name, and had pressed a handful of dried grass into his hands and shown him, slow, how to braid. *Make her something pretty, Ethan. She's still half a child.*

After her mother had died, the only person who had still made those little woven things for Rayna had been Ethan.

Until Mia came along.

Rayna had hated that. She had thrown tantrums over it. She had ordered Ethan, with all the petulance of a Don's daughter, not to weave a single thing for the new stepsister.

And Ethan, calm and cool, had told her she was being unreasonable.

He had told her that a great many times, in eight years of marriage.

"What do you want?" Ethan asked Mia now, gentle.

Mia's eyes slid sideways. She found Rayna at the edge of the garden, and the corner of her mouth lifted, just a little. A smile only Rayna would catch.

"A rabbit," Mia said, sweet as syrup. "Make me a rabbit."

Ethan's hands stopped. He didn’t say no.

Rayna turned and walked away.

A woven straw rabbit. Of all the things.

Her mother had made her one, the last summer before the war took her — a small, lopsided thing with one ear bent. After the warehouse fire had taken their old house down to the studs, that rabbit had been the only piece of her mother Rayna had managed to dig out of the ash. It sat now on the top shelf of her wardrobe, in a velvet-lined box, where only one person in the world besides her knew to look.

Mia had never cared about woven grass in her life. She was not asking for a toy. She just want to put her thumb on Rayna's pain, because she saw her.

Rayna did not hide. She did not duck down a side path.

She walked straight back across the gravel with her chin up, and at the moment she passed the pavilion, she felt Ethan's eyes lift and follow her.

She did not turn her head.

"Childish," Rayna said aloud, to the empty hallway. Her voice was steady.

She stepped over the box and shut her door.

The next morning, the rabbit was still there. Untouched. The dew had not even gotten to it; someone had set a sheet of waxed paper underneath the box.

She stared at it for a long moment, the cold tile under her bare feet.

Then she bent down, picked the rabbit up, and slipped it into the inside pocket of her jacket, against her ribs.