Chapter 1

The case board had grown a second layer of pins.

Inspector Maya Young stood in front of it the way other people stood in front of a mirror they didn’t like, arms crossed, jaw tight, looking for the flaw she’d missed a hundred times already. Twelve informants, dead or vanished, each one a red thread pinned to a photograph. A supply chain that moved more fentanyl through the port in a month than the whole department seized in a year. And at the center of it, connected to everything and touched by nothing, the face she’d been staring at for three years.

Don Vittorio Marchetti. Sixty-one years old. Two convictions in four decades, both overturned. A man who sent birthday cards to the children of judges.

“You’re doing the thing again,” said a voice behind her.

Maya didn’t turn around. “What thing.”

“The thing where you look at him like if you stare hard enough he’ll confess.” Captain Reyes set two coffees down on her desk, which meant one of two things. Either he needed something, or he was about to give her something she wouldn’t want.

She turned around. He was holding a manila folder against his chest like it might try to get away from him.

“Which is it,” she said.

“Sit down, Young.”

She didn’t sit down. He sighed and set the folder on the desk between them, and for a second neither of them touched it, the way you don’t touch something you already suspect is going to hurt.

“Federal liaison sent this down this morning,” Reyes said. “Priority flag. Pre-approved. They want you on it starting Monday.”

“Pre-approved by who?” “That’s the thing.” He rubbed the back of his neck. In eleven years, Maya had learned to read that gesture the way sailors read weather. “Normally a joint op like this comes through three signatures before it reaches me. This one came through one. A liaison neither of us has ever worked with. No local field office cosign, no interagency memo, just a green light and a start date.”

“That’s not how this works.”

“I know that’s not how this works,” Reyes said. “I called up to ask about it and got told, very politely, that the timeline was not flexible and my questions were noted.” He finally opened the folder and turned it toward her. “They want you to marry into the Marchetti family.”

For a moment Maya thought she’d misheard him. Then she looked down at the photograph clipped to the top page and understood she hadn’t.

He was younger than she expected. Not Vittorio, whom she could have drawn from memory by now, jowls and gold rings and the smile he wore like a weapon. This was someone else. Dark hair, a jaw that looked like it had been set more than once, eyes that weren’t smiling even though the corner of his mouth was. Nico Marchetti. Thirty-one. Five years served for aggravated assault, released four years ago. Currently running an import business out of the waterfront that the file politely called “of interest.”

“Vittorio’s son,” Reyes said. “Estranged, on paper. Doesn’t live at the estate. Doesn’t attend family functions unless he’s forced to. On paper, he’s the one Marchetti who wanted out.”

“On paper.”

“On paper,” Reyes agreed. “The Bureau’s read is that if anyone in that family can be gotten close to without getting made in a week, it’s him. They want a way in that isn’t a wire on a soldier who’ll be dead in a month. They want someone inside the house.”

Maya picked up the photograph and studied it the way she studied everything, for the tell, the crack, the place where the performance ended and the person began. She didn’t find one. That unsettled her more than if she had.

“They want me to marry a stranger,” she said, “to get inside a house I’ve been trying to get inside for three years, on a timeline nobody can explain, approved by somebody nobody’s heard of.”

“That’s the assignment.”

“And if I say no?”

Reyes was quiet for a second too long. “They didn’t ask if you’d be willing, Young. They asked when you’d be available.” Maya set the photograph down. Outside the window, the city was doing what it always did at this hour, indifferent and loud, twelve floors below a board covered in the faces of people who’d trusted the wrong person and hadn’t lived to regret it slowly. She thought about her sister, five years gone, and about how many times she’d stood in front of this board promising her a version of justice that kept sliding further away.

“I’ll do it,” she said.

Reyes didn’t look relieved. If anything, he looked more uneasy than before, like a man who’d just watched someone volunteer for something he didn’t fully understand and couldn’t talk them out of.

“One more thing,” he said, already turning to go, like he wanted the sentence out of his mouth and behind him as fast as possible. “The timeline they gave us. First contact needs to happen inside two weeks. Engagement inside two months.”

“That’s fast for a courtship nobody’s supposed to notice is being run.”

“I know.”

“Why the rush?”

Reyes stopped in the doorway. For just a second, something moved behind his eyes that looked almost like an apology.

“I asked that too,” he said. “They didn’t answer that one either.”

He left. Maya stood alone with the folder, the coffee going cold, and the photograph of a stranger she was already, on paper, engaged to become. She looked at Nico Marchetti’s eyes one more time and had the distinct, unwelcome feeling that whatever was about to start, she was not the only one walking into it blind.