Chapter 2

I didn't cry. Maybe the tears in me had dried up a long time ago.

I sat in a run-down hotel on the east side of the city, the paint peeling off the walls like flakes of dead skin.

Three in the morning. The rusty water backed up in the pipes all night let out a slow gulp, gulp — like the labored breathing of someone drowning.

I sat on the edge of the bed, my phone face-down on my knee. The screen was dead black. No notifications. Nothing.

Eight years. I'd grown used to waiting for word from Sal — even a single punctuation mark. But now the air had been vacuumed out of the room, and that absolute silence was harder to breathe than any screaming fight.

More than once I picked up the phone, my thumb sliding to the unlock key, then forced myself to stop at the last second. What was I waiting for? An explanation? Some excuse dressed up as a misunderstanding?

Eight years. I'd fed eight years of loyalty to the dogs.

By seven the sun was up, sharp enough to hurt. I stood in front of the mansion I knew better than anywhere on earth. Every grain in every floor tile, the color of the curtains behind every window — I knew it all. I'd set that door's code myself. Six digits, a rearrangement of his birthday.

I pressed my card to the reader.

Beep —

A red light. A short, almost mocking tone of refusal.

I froze, my palms slick with cold sweat. I didn't believe it, and pressed it again. Red light.

Access revoked.

That wasn't a glitch. Those small, cold letters announced a clean, surgical excision. Someone had sat at the desk that used to be mine and, unhurried, struck the name "Gemma" from every database, one stroke at a time. Without alarming anyone. Without even notifying me.

Like clearing out a piece of furniture that had gone out of style.

Hands shaking, I called Marco. He'd been with me eight years — the hardest bone in Sal's whole crew, and the only man who'd seen me come in at midnight covered in blood, squaring away Sal's dirty ledgers.

Three rings.

The voice that answered wasn't Marco's. A stranger — young, keyboard clattering in the background, cold with the chill of a man doing his job.

"Mr. Marco reports to Madam Bianca now."

Madam. The word landed light as nothing against my eardrum.

My heart clenched like an invisible hand had closed on it. Before I could speak, the line clicked dead.

I stood in the middle of the morning road, the sunlight blurring my sight.

Marco. Even you're going to pretend you don't know me? After eight years — after the three days and three nights the three of us stood on a freezing dock washing a dead man's money clean for Sal — even that counts for less than one word, "Madam"?

Back at the hotel, I reached into the hidden pocket of my document case.

I'd sewn that seam myself, stitch by stitch — hidden, hard, safe. Shaking, I tore open the last of the lining.

Empty.

The medal my mother left me was gone.

I sank down in the dark, jaw clamped shut until my mouth filled with the taste of rust.

That medal was the only thing on earth that proved I'd ever existed as a person. Worthless to them. To me, the one comfort I had in that mansion.

Someone had taken it.

They didn't just want me gone. They wanted my past, my faith, every trace of "Gemma" — all of it burned clean.

I hugged the empty case, nails cutting into my palms.

Sal. What a hard, cold heart you have.

* * *

In those three years overseas, cargo wasn't the only thing I hid for this family.

There was one stretch, the worst of it, the blood on the docks not yet dry, when a call came from home. There was something "important," they said. I was to watch it myself. No one else could touch it.

When they brought it to me, I stood there a long time.

It was a child. A newborn, only weeks old, wrapped in a swaddle with no markings on it at all.

No one told me whose he was. In this family, you don't ask what you're not meant to ask. I knew the rules.

I kept him two, maybe three months.

He cried at night; I got up and fed him. He ran a fever; I held him through till morning, pressing my own warmth into him to bring it down. The wind off the docks was brutal, so I tucked him inside my coat and hid him there, close — the same way I hid Sal's cigars.

Those months, he knew my arms. He knew the smell of the inside of my coat. When I fed him, he'd close his fist around my finger and hold on tight. So tight.

Then people came, said nothing, and took him away.

I assumed he was just another of this family's things that couldn't see daylight — used, and collected back.

I didn't let myself think about it. I didn't dare ask.

I never mentioned it to anyone.

Like everything else I've hidden, I hid that away too, in the deepest place in me.

* * *

I went to the bathroom and looked at the woman in the mirror. Shadows under her eyes, lips white, hair a mess. I looked at her, and that soft impulse to sob was snuffed out where it stood.

I lifted my face out of the cold water and wiped the drops away.

The Gemma in the mirror — her eyes had changed.

Those were eyes that had seen the filthiest things in eight years, handled the ugliest situations, and still hadn't gone all the way dead.

If this door won't let me in, then I'll bring down the whole wall.