Chapter 3

I called an old friend of my father's. The man had watched me grow up, and in this world his one mercy was that, now and then, he'd let a piece of the truth slip.

The phone rang a long time — long enough that I thought no one on earth would take a call from a dead woman anymore.

"Gemma." His voice came like it was climbing up out of a bomb shelter — low, hoarse, stale with something long dead.

"She isn't 'another woman,' Gemma." He paused, and there was a bystander's cruelty in his tone. "Sal agreed to the Rizzos' terms. The port. The smuggling routes. And… you. This marriage is the seal on a truce between the two families."

The phone slid from my ear and dropped hard onto the mattress.

The smell of mildew in the room grew thicker.

I looked out at the dim neon through the window, the dizziness rising in me like a tide. No accident. No misunderstanding. Just one cold sheet of contract.

For eight years I thought I'd been building a man's empire. I'd been raising a buyer's asset — an expensive, useful, tradeable toy.

I looked down at my hands. These hands had held Sal's blood-soaked ledgers. Had shielded him from a stray round in a downpour. For this so-called "family," again and again, I'd cut my own heart out and let it freeze hard in the cold wind — and now they were telling me I was the chip that had to be cashed out to cut their losses.

"And Sal?" My voice was calmer than I'd expected.

"At Bianca's estate." He didn't relax at my calm; if anything he dropped his voice lower, like he was reciting something forbidden. "He signed the transfer himself. Wiped every record of you out of the family archive. Gemma — in the eyes of the law, you're already a person who doesn't exist."

I hung up.

In that moment I didn't come apart. What I felt was a cold that went to the bone. I pushed open the hotel's rust-eaten window and the wind poured in, stirring the hair at my forehead.

I thought of the year I turned fourteen — the first time the old don gave me that red dress. Sal was standing behind him. He wore a fine black suit, his eyes still and deep as a well. He came over and fixed my collar for me, gentle to the point of reverence.

"Gemma, you're the cleverest of them all," he said, back then.

So that was it. He hadn't been looking at me. He'd been checking the durability of the tool.

Eight years. What I took for love was only a long, elegant keeping.

I dug a brow razor out of my bag, the cold metal against my skin. I slit open the lining of the case — where everything I had of my mother used to be hidden. Now there was only an empty, echoing bareness.

Who raised you into what you are today?

The man's words on the phone were a rusted saw, cutting a gash open in my mind. My mother died of some vague, sudden illness — back before Sal took over the family. But what if the board was already set when she died?

I got up, went to the sink, and rinsed my face in water cold enough to sting. I could feel my own eyes changing, degree by degree — from the first shock, to something close to a drained, dead stillness, and finally into a cold, reckless madness.

I picked up the lighter off the table and turned it over, slow.

Sal — since you've decided to send me off as a gift, you'd better pray this gift doesn't go off on the Rizzos' wedding bed.

I changed into a clean dark coat and pulled my hair back, sharp and low. The corridor outside was still full of cheap quarreling, but I couldn't hear it anymore. I walked toward the end of the street, where a figure seemed to be watching from the shadows.

But I wasn't the Gemma who waited for Sal to come home anymore.

I'm the knife he sharpened with his own hands. And now I'm going back to open his throat.