Chapter 2

I nodded, and there was no time left in me to grieve the things that had died with my last life.

Lorenzo and Dominic were already on the line, one voice layered over the other, urging me down to the courtyard where the cars waited. The stairwell of the old Genovese house had never felt so long. All the way down I felt the eyes on me, soldiers and cousins and the wives of made men, heads tipping together, mouths moving behind cupped hands. Whispers on the street had crawled inside our own walls now. Somewhere on the landing a foot slid out low and quick, and I went down hard against the cold marble, my palm skidding, my knee cracking against the edge of a step.

I cursed under my breath. "Bitch."

I found my feet again, dazed, the pain climbing my leg in a slow burn, and I limped the rest of the way with my hand pressed to the banister. No one offered an arm. In a house that had once made men beg for the honor of touching a Genovese, no one moved.

At the turn of the corridor, before I came into view, I heard Livia's voice threading through the murmur, soft and careful, pitched exactly loud enough to carry to my two childhood companions.

"I did see Francesca get out of one of the cars from the safehouse network in the dead of night," she said, low, reluctant, as though the words pained her to speak. "But that doesn't mean anything. Maybe Francesca truly earned her place there on her own."

The mercy in it was a blade turned edge-out.

"Livia, don't cover for her." That was one of them, sharp with the certainty of a man who had already decided. "She won't even say how she got in. She's guilty. That's why she keeps it buried."

"He's right. You're too soft, Livia. You keep letting her fool you because you've got a kind heart. A woman that calculating, with a mind like hers, there's nothing she wouldn't do."

I stood in the shadow of the doorway and let it wash over me. When I'd been taken into the protected network, I had put my name to their code of silence, the same Omertà that had kept better people than me alive. My rank, my standing, the truth of how I had climbed, all of it sealed. I had done it to survive. Livia had taken that silence and sharpened it into a weapon, and she wielded it now with two clean fingers pressed lightly to the base of her throat, wounded, innocent, the picture of a girl too gentle to accuse.

And my two companions, Lorenzo and Dominic, who had grown up in these same halls, who had watched me bleed over every scrap of standing I ever won for my grandmother's sake, chose her word over the years they had known me.

I smiled, and it tasted of iron, and I told myself it did not matter.

Once I passed fully into the network, my name would be scrubbed from every ledger the Families could reach. I would become a ghost the Valente and Falcone lines could burn a fortune chasing and never find. When that day came I could cut every thread that bound me to them and never again stand in a corridor listening to men I had loved carve me up for sport. No more living like a fool inside a long con. No more dying the way I had died before.

I let my face go smooth, pretended the walls had swallowed every word, and stepped out in front of the three of them. My fist had found the small worn Genovese signet at my throat without my deciding it, the chain warm from my skin. I let it go before they could see how hard I was holding it.

"What was it you wanted to say to me?"

Lorenzo turned to me, and the contempt he'd worn a heartbeat ago melted into something practiced and warm. He was turning the Valente ring slowly around his little finger, an easy circle, unhurried. "Francesca. This is good news. We'll be under the same roof again, all of us. All those years you spent grinding away, they didn't come to nothing after all."

Dominic smiled too, the way you smile at a stray you've decided to be generous with.

And I stood there in the cold marble hush of the house my blood had built, feeling the whispers press in from every side, and understood that whatever these two had come to offer me, it was already too late.