Chapter 2

Everything I thought we had built together, the love, the devotion, the quiet certainty that a man like Salvatore Marchetti had chosen me, was nothing more than a stage set he had constructed brick by brick for my benefit. An elaborate front, no more real than the shell companies the Family used to bury its cash.

Memories of our time together flickered through my mind like a reel of film run by a cruel hand, each frame designed to wound.

When he had bought every billboard along the harbor road and set them ablaze with my name, he had leaned close and murmured, "Adriana, this is only the first move. I mean to take your heart the way this Family takes territory. Completely."

When we had crossed oceans together, private cars idling on foreign tarmacs, he had said, "Adriana, I'll lay the whole world at your feet. Every city that matters, every door that opens only for men like me."

When he had knelt on the cold sand at the water's edge, the tide licking at his hand-stitched shoes, he had looked up at me and said, "I love you, Adriana. Marry me. Bind your blood to mine."

Now my vision swam, the memories dissolving into salt. I reached up to wipe my cheek and only then realized the tears had already come, sliding down without my permission. I pressed my thumb hard against the thin scar on my left wrist, the old wound that had once taken eighteen stitches, and felt the familiar ridge of it beneath the pad of my finger. A habit born of survival. Even now, some animal part of me was already bracing to run.

My phone lit up in my palm.

A message. A silent partner, referred to me quietly through an old contact from a bloodline far outside the Territory, asking whether I would travel to Dubai to handle the laundering of a considerable fortune. Delicate work. The kind only a fixer with my reputation could be trusted to touch. Before tonight, I would have refused without a second thought. My place was here. My loyalty was here.

But now.

The voices behind the office door died all at once. A deathly silence fell over the corridor, the kind of quiet that settles over a room the instant everyone in it realizes something has gone wrong. I stood frozen in the hush, not knowing whether to slip away or hold my ground, when the door opened and a woman stepped out, flustered, smoothing the front of her jacket as though brushing away evidence.

Salvatore's personal courier. The girl who carried his sealed messages between safe houses and never once wrote anything down.

"Miss Sorrentino." Her voice caught on my name. "What a surprise. When did you arrive?"

I forced my mouth into the shape of a smile and lifted the thermos in my hand, letting its weight speak for me. "Just now. I brought Salvatore some soup."

The breath went out of her in a rush, relief so plain it was almost pitiful, and she stepped aside and opened the door wide for me.

Salvatore saw me and crossed the room at once, the way he always did, sweeping the thermos from my hands as if the effort of holding it might bruise me.

"It's cold out there," he chided, his voice low and warm, that soft register he saved only for me. "You'll catch a chill, tesoro."

The courier passed him a small remote without a word. He turned up the heat until the vents sighed, then fetched a cashmere throw and draped it across my shoulders with a tenderness that once would have undone me. I curled into the corner of the leather couch, wrapped in warmth, and still the cold reached me. It came from somewhere no blanket could touch, seeping through muscle and into bone, settling in the marrow like frost.

His men and the courier took their leave one by one, each of them offering me a polite, deferential nod on their way out, the small courtesies owed to the Don's chosen woman. And for the first time I understood, with terrible clarity, what those smiles had always meant.

Every time they had smiled at me like that, I had believed they were teasing him, marveling that a boss of his standing, a man whose displeasure could end a life between one breath and the next, would humble himself so completely for a woman. I had thought their eyes held affection.

Now I knew. They had been laughing. Not with me. At me. The whole inner circle of the Family, in on the joke, watching the fixer who could trace every hidden dollar fail to see the deception laid out an inch from her own face.

Salvatore turned back to me, and something anxious moved behind his eyes, so convincing that even now a part of me wanted to believe it.

"Are you cold?" he asked softly.