Chapter 1

On the Feast of the Seven Fishes, the tribute offering I'd spent days assembling for the partner Family had been swapped out for cheap, unmarked trash.

Colorful lace underthings, arranged into the shape of holiday sweets, delivered straight into the hands of a made man's wife.

The woman came to the social club herself and slapped me across the face in front of every soldier in the room.

"So this is how the Marchetti crew seals a pact. With filthy little tricks like this. That arrangement my husband made with you people, you talked him into it on your back, didn't you?"

The whispers moved through the club before the sting had faded from my cheek. I brought the proof to Lorenzo Marchetti to clear my name, but he didn't so much as lift his head.

"Vittoria Grasso already told me. She's the one who switched the offering. She only did it to save the crew money. Her intentions were good."

"The fault here is yours. Why didn't you check the package before it left our hands? A little care and none of this happens. It's clear you can't handle running operations, so go back to the bottom and learn it all over again. As it happens, we're short a runner for the errand work."

Years of loyalty turned to ash in a single instant.

Thinking of the five years I'd bled for this crew, I lifted the chain from around my neck without hesitation and dropped it on his desk.

"I'm out."

Later, I would become the boss his crew had to answer to, and he would kneel and weep, begging me for mercy.

……

At my words, Lorenzo reluctantly raised his head, and when he saw the state I was in, a flicker of surprise crossed his eyes.

Both sides of my face were swollen high, my hair a ruin, the top two buttons of my collar torn away, a broad patch of fingernail scratches exposed across my throat.

Yet even so, there wasn't a trace of pity in Lorenzo's eyes. He sneered with contempt.

"Adriana, with the respect you've got left, tell me, if you walk away from this crew, what Family would ever take you in?"

He wet his lower lip and glanced, quick and quiet, toward the shut door of the back room where Vittoria waited before he went on. "You're not young anymore. Don't play a little girl's game of playing hard to get."

More than a decade at his side had made him certain I'd never bear to leave him. Walking away from the crew was a thing that simply was not done.

"Then tell me, after something like this, how am I supposed to hold my ground here? Do you know what they're saying about me?"

Even the smallest twitch at the corner of my mouth ached, but I couldn't stop myself from throwing the question at him.

He knew full well how much damage this had done to my standing, yet to shield Vittoria, he still let me carry the dishonor alone.

Was more than ten years of loyalty really worth less than the three months he'd known Vittoria?

"A few ugly whispers won't cost you a pound of flesh. Besides, shouldn't you be used to it by now?"

Lorenzo's tone was breezy, offhand, yet it landed like a hammer on my heart.

So he'd known all along. Known that the soldiers called me his lapdog behind my back, that I'd fawned over him for more than ten years with no rank to show for it, that I clung to him and wouldn't let go.

In a rush it came back to me, how when Vittoria first came around, someone had murmured that she was an outsider with no blood in the life and didn't belong near the Marchetti table.

By the next morning, that man had been cut loose from the crew for good.

It wasn't that Lorenzo never had the time to deal with such trifles. It was only that the one he took to heart had never been me.

My head swam again for an instant, but I braced myself and refused to back down. My fingers closed around the jade pendant at my throat, my mother's, cool against my burning skin.

"I don't want to hear any more of it, so I'm walking. Perfect timing. It clears a place at the table for your little sweetheart."

The words had barely left my mouth when a glass shattered at my feet, the shards bursting up to slice a bloody line across my bare shin.

"Adriana, you don't actually think this crew can't run without you, do you? The Marchetti household took you in and fed you for more than ten years, and who would've guessed we'd raise nothing but an ungrateful wretch in the end."

Lorenzo's face was dark as thunder, as if he wanted nothing more than to come across that desk and tear me apart.