Chapter 4

When I turned to leave, Lorenzo caught the change in me before I could hide it. He took my hand, and there was guilt buried under the calm of his voice, the way there always was when a Valente wanted something to sound like affection. "Francesca, don't trouble yourself over it. We're good to Livia because she's under your protection. Because she's yours."

Dominic reached over and ruffled my hair the way he had since we were children scaling the walls of the old estate, as though I were still a girl and not the last name standing between the Genovese bloodline and its grave. "Stop turning it over in your head. The sit-downs are finished, the season's done. Take one of the cars out, let the territory breathe under your wheels. We had something made for you."

I nodded and let it pass. I had already decided to disappear, so I did not refuse them. I wanted, one last time, to look at this city where the three of us had grown up in the shadow of our Families, before I became a ghost it could no longer name.

When we came down to the garage, cold concrete and the low gleam of chrome under the strip lights, Lorenzo and Dominic both moved at once to put Livia in the passenger seat. It was almost comic, two heirs of two rising Families competing to seat a stray.

Livia looked at me with that practiced flicker of embarrassment, two fingers rising to press lightly at the base of her throat as if the whole thing pained her. "Isn't the passenger seat only ever Francesca's? If I sit there, she'll be unhappy with me. I couldn't."

Lorenzo took the lead, easing her down into the seat before she could finish the performance. He turned the Valente heirloom ring on his little finger, slow, unhurried circles as he spoke. "She doesn't need it. She won't mind. Francesca has the best temper of anyone I know."

She doesn't deserve it. That was the shape of it, underneath the softer words. I heard it clearly, the way you hear a threat wrapped in a compliment at a table full of made men.

Dominic shot him a look, jaw tight, cracking the first knuckle of his right hand without seeming to notice he'd done it. He slammed the car door with a temper he didn't bother to hide.

It wasn't until the engine was turning over that either of them realized I hadn't gotten in. They rolled the windows down and glanced at each other, two capos suddenly caught without a script, wanting to explain and finding no reason worth speaking aloud.

So I spoke first and spared them the trouble. "It's fine. I'll take my own car."

Hearing that, they both let out a breath, relieved, and then unsettled all over again, because the Francesca they knew would have folded, would have smiled and made herself small to keep the peace. This one didn't.

"Francesca." Lorenzo tried to call me back, my name careful on his tongue.

I rolled up the window before he could finish, unwilling to sit and be fed one more of their gentle lies. My hand found the small worn Genovese signet on its chain at my throat and closed around it, the last honest thing my grandmother had ever given me, and I held it until the cold of the metal steadied my pulse.

Still, the streets did what streets do. The scenery drew up memory after memory I could not refuse the way I'd refused the two of them. We three had grown up as childhood companions inside the old blood, tangled together from the start. From the time we were small to the men they'd become, both of them had chased me, both had said they wanted me, said it like a claim staked on Genovese land. And then my parents were gone, taken in an accident, and the once-feared Genovese Family had been left with only Nonna and me, holding each other up over the ruin of a name.