Chapter 2
I crossed the kitchen and took her hands before she could pull them back. Turned them over. The skin at her knuckles had cracked and reddened in a way that doesn’t happen from one night of dishes.
“How long has this been going on?”
“Luca—”
“How long, Claire.”
Her jaw tightened. For a second I thought she’d lie to me, the way people learn to lie when the truth costs too much.
“Ask your mother,” she said instead.
Behind us, through the swinging kitchen door, I could hear Vivienne’s laugh rising over the music — that particular laugh she saves for rooms full of people she wants something from.
I let go of Claire’s hands, gently, and reached into my coat. Not for the necklace.
For the folder I’d been carrying since Detroit — six weeks of wire transfers I still hadn’t fully explained to myself, routed through a company called Ferro Holdings, a name that meant nothing to me until an hour ago, when my accountant traced it straight to a man who’d spent the last year trying to bury me.
“Luca.”
Claire’s hand caught my sleeve.
“What is that?”
I didn’t answer her yet.
Because through the kitchen window, I’d just watched my mother lift a glass in a toast, and I needed to hear exactly what she was toasting to before I walked into that room and ended the party myself.
I pushed the kitchen door open with two fingers.
Nobody heard it. Nobody was supposed to.
“—and to family,” my mother was saying, glass raised high, “the only thing worth protecting in this world.”
I stepped into the light.
The room didn’t notice me first. It noticed the silence spreading from the back, guests turning one by one, the music fading out of someone’s attention until it felt like it had stopped entirely.
“Luca.”
My mother’s glass lowered an inch.
“You’re not supposed to be—”
“Home?” I said. “I live here.”
Isabella’s smile went brittle.
“We thought you were in Detroit until Thursday.”
“I was.” I set the folder on the table between the champagne flutes. “Then something came up that couldn’t wait.”
My mother’s eyes dropped to the folder and came back up too fast.
“Sit down, Mother.”
“I’m hosting a party, Luca, this isn’t the—”
“Sit. Down.”
She sat.
I opened the folder to the first page and turned it to face her.
“Ferro Holdings,” I said. “Ring a bell?”
Her face didn’t move, which told me everything her voice tried not to.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“You signed six transfers through it in the last six weeks.” I tapped the page. “Half a million dollars, twice.”
Isabella’s champagne glass slipped from her hand and shattered against the hardwood. Nobody moved to clean it up.
“Where’s Claire’s seat at this table?” I asked, looking around the room. “I don’t see it.”
Silence.
May you like
“She’s in the kitchen,” my mother finally said. “She offered.”
“She didn’t offer.” My voice stayed low. Low is worse than loud, in my world. “You put her there. The same six weeks this money was moving.”
