Chapter 6

I had no patience left for their theater downstairs, so I climbed to my room and left the door open as I began to pack. Each folded garment felt like a stone laid on a scale, weighing what I was leaving against what I had already lost. The house had the hush of a place where men spoke in numbers and threats behind closed doors, where the marble stayed cold no matter how much sun poured through the windows.

Salvatore appeared moments later, leaning against the doorframe with the ease of a man who had never once in his life been told to wait. He walked toward me, hands buried in his pockets, then drew out a ruby necklace, the stone at its center the size of a pigeon's egg, dark as old blood under the light.

"It's, um, peace offering. Will you forgive me?"

He thought I was wounded because he had postponed the blood-bound union feast. That wasn't it at all. I was tired of his charade. Tired of watching the Don of the Marchetti Family force himself to love me, tired of the way his affection came out rehearsed, like tribute counted twice before it was handed over. My thumb drifted, almost of its own will, toward the thin scar on my left wrist, and I pressed it there, hard, steadying myself against the truth I could not say aloud.

When I gave him nothing, Salvatore unfastened the necklace himself and slipped it around my throat. His fingers were warm, precise, the hands of a man who dealt in both silk and slaughter and never confused the two.

"The Family is holding a celebration tonight. A sit-down, a feast. Come with me," he said.

"I can't," I replied, pushing my suitcase toward the door, past the wall of him. "I have plans."

"You wouldn't want your betrothed to walk into a room full of bosses with another woman on his arm, would you?" His voice stayed smooth, unhurried, but the signet ring on his right hand had begun to turn in slow circles, and I had learned long ago what that meant. He was in control. He was certain of me. "Besides, half the territory will be there tonight. Every name that matters. I'm sure you'll enjoy it."

I hesitated. My hand loosened on the handle of the suitcase.

This journey to Dubai, to a life stitched together under a stranger's name, could well be a one-way passage. I might never set foot in the Territory again, never breathe this poisoned air a second time. Perhaps I should use this final night to say my quiet goodbyes to the men and women I had once counted as my own, the associates who had watched me launder the Family's blood money into something clean enough to survive the light.

I nodded, barely.

Salvatore's mood lifted at once, the way a tide turns the instant the moon permits it. He called for a stylist and a woman to paint my face, and they came up the stairs like couriers summoned by a boss who did not know how to be refused.

An hour later I emerged in a floor-length couture gown, its train pooling behind me like spilled ink across the obsidian floor, the ruby resting cold against my collarbone. I looked, I thought, exactly like what I was pretending to be. A promised bride. An ornament in the window of a criminal empire.

When Salvatore saw me his eyes caught fire, and he opened the car door with something almost like reverence. "You look beautiful."

Just as I stepped toward his car, Lucia shouldered past me, sweeping the hem of her gown up in one theatrical fistful. She came from a lesser branch of the bloodline, but she carried herself as though the whole empire had been promised to her in the cradle.

"This gown is far too grand to fold into that little car. Trade with me, Adri?" Her voice dripped honey, the kind poured over something meant to rot. The ruby at her throat was larger than mine, brighter, drinking the sunlight and throwing it back in sharp little blades that felt aimed straight at my eyes.

I glanced down at my own necklace, at its delicate chain and modest stone, and it seemed to shrink before me, a trinket picked from the bottom of a peddler's tray.

"My dress is just as large," I said, my tone gone to ice. I would not stoop to feed her petty games.

Lucia's lip pushed out in a wounded pout, and she leaned toward Salvatore, tilting her head. Then she laughed, soft and quick, a beat too early, before a single funny thing had been said. "But I get so carsick. I need the bigger car," she whimpered, her voice dropping to that fragile, pitiful register, as though she were some delicate creature the whole Family was sworn to shield from harm.