Chapter 1 - Four Hours Married
The bullet punched through the rear window before I understood we were being followed.
Glass came apart in a slow, suspended hail, safety-designed but still vicious, and I dropped across the seat as the driver — Sandro, who had been with Cristian for twelve years — said something in Sicilian through his teeth and drove the car into another dimension of speed. My shoulder hit the door handle. My phone skittered across the floor. Outside the tinted windows the city of New York became a blur of light and motion, and somewhere behind us an engine was gaining.
I had been married for four hours.
This was what I thought, absurdly, as the second shot took out the wing mirror: I have been married for four hours, and I already know the marriage is a catastrophe, and now someone is trying to kill me, and the worst part is I cannot decide which of these facts is the most humiliating.
Because I knew. I had known since the corridor outside the library at the Farano estate, two hours before the ceremony, when I had stopped to fix my veil and heard my husband’s voice through a partially open door.
“I don’t need a wife,” Cristian Farano had said. Low, controlled, the voice he used when he was delivering facts rather than opinions. “I need a seal on an agreement.”
I had pressed against the wall in my twenty-thousand-dollar dress and listened to him describe me to his lieutenant Enzo the way a man might describe a property line.
“Ricci controls the waterfront access. His daughter is the simplest way to formalize the arrangement without cash changing hands. It’s cleaner than a contract.”
Simpler. Cleaner.
I was twenty-three years old. I had spent the previous two years studying architecture in Rome. I had come home for what my father described as a necessary conversation, and within a week I was standing in a bridal fitting, and within six weeks I was in a chapel watching a man I had met four times press his mouth to mine with all the warmth of a handshake.
And now the car was taking a corner at a speed that put my body into the door, and Sandro was on his phone saying ambush, east of the bridge, four vehicles, and I was discovering that the people who had decided I was a useful transaction had also made me a useful target.
Ricci’s daughter. Simplest way to formalize.
The car screamed into a parking structure and went dark.
“Out,” Sandro said.
He had his weapon drawn. Three other men materialized from somewhere — I had not seen them enter the structure — and they moved around the car with a precision that suggested rehearsal.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Somewhere safe.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Sandro looked at me the way people look at things that are being difficult at an inconvenient time. “Mrs. Farano—”
“Don’t.” My voice was steadier than I felt. “Don’t call me that right now. Just tell me where you’re taking me.”
A pause. Then: “The family has a property on the river. Secure. Mr. Farano is already en route.”
Cristian. Of course. Because apparently the man who had described me as the cleanest available transaction was now coordinating my protection detail.
I smoothed my dress — still in the dress, absurdly, four hours and a car chase later — and let them move me through the parking structure to a second vehicle.
The property on the river was not what I expected. I had assumed Farano money would produce something cold and architectural, all glass and implied menace. Instead, it was a brownstone that looked older than the neighborhood, with thick walls and a garden that someone had clearly tended for years. Inside: warm wood, books, a kitchen that smelled of coffee someone had already started.
Sandro put me in a sitting room with a view of the water and said Cristian would arrive within the hour.
I sat down on a small sofa and looked at my hands.
There was a bruise forming on my shoulder from the door handle. My dress was torn at the hem. The pearl earrings my mother had given me — the something borrowed, though nothing about this day had felt borrowed so much as stolen — were still in place.
I thought about the corridor outside the library.
I had almost kept walking when I heard his voice. Almost. My feet had stopped before my brain had caught up, and by the time I understood what I was doing, I had already heard enough.
Ricci’s daughter. Simplest way to formalize.
But then there had been a pause, and Enzo had said something I couldn’t hear, and Cristian had said: “I went to Ricci directly. He didn’t come to me.”
I had replayed that sentence four times during the ceremony.
He didn’t come to me.
May you like
Which meant Cristian had initiated the arrangement. Not my father. Not the Farano family pressing an advantage. Cristian himself had approached my father with a proposal.
I was still trying to work out what that meant when the front door opened and my husband walked in with blood on his collar and the expression of a man who had just survived something he hadn’t expected to survive.
