I pull the phone away from my ear and send a text to the doorman that reads, “Do what she says, Jean.”
She’s waiting quietly when I put the phone back to my ear.
“I’m seven minutes away. Please, make yourself comfortable.” The drive is more like ten minutes, but I gave my driver, Samuel, the week off, and he’s much more careful than I am.
She hangs up, and I rush to the town car parked on the curb, leaving my meal half-eaten on the table with a hundred-dollar bill. I’m impressed that Jean would be brave enough to say no to Marianna Morelli. It’s his job, of course, but I don’t know that I could deny her, and I have a lot of practice saying no to intimidating individuals.
When I get to the building six and a half minutes later, Jean is flustered and fidgeting at his desk. He rushes around the side, apologizing profusely for his misstep.
“That’s quite alright, Jean,” I say as I stride toward the elevator. He takes rushed steps to keep up with my gait.
“It won’t happen again, I assure you, and—sir, are you smiling?”
“Hm?”
The elevator chimes before opening in front of us, and I waste no time stepping inside. “No, Jean. Happy holidays.”
A blur of my reflection reflects on the metal doors and damn if he’s not right.
I force my expression in check as the elevator climbs to the penthouse suite.
She’s here to call off the engagement. It’s probably the shortest-lived engagement in existence. She proposed marriage—well, demanded it, really—barely more than 24 hours ago, and now she’s here to tell me that she’s come to her senses.
So why am I so excited to see her here?
I resist the urge to call out to her when the door opens into the apartment’s foyer, instead stepping inside and looking first to the sitting room, which is empty. I carry on to the kitchen and the wide living room. She’s there, arms crossed over her chest, in a maroon sweater and a skirt that shows me too much of her thighs. Knee-high leather boots.
“Marianna,” I say, and she doesn’t turn around. Doesn’t acknowledge that she heard me at all as she peers out the tall window to the city below. I often stand like she does now and remind myself that by some farce of fate that this is my city—the one I own. She and her sisters own Boston just as much as I do, though.
“Why do you call me that?” she asks. I stand to her right facing the glass. “Nobody calls me Marianna since he died.”
She doesn’t need to elaborate on thehein question.
Lorenzo Morelli was a formidable man, one whose soft spot for his daughters should have made him weak. My father certainly believed it did. If it did, Lorenzo’s loving them certainly didn’t makethemweak. My father thought it a disgrace to teach your daughters to fight, to let them in on business, and he saidas much to Lorenzo any chance they had the displeasure of meeting.
“Marianna suits you.” It’s the single most beautiful name I have ever heard, rolling over the syllables in my mind. “I never thought Shadow quite fit you,” I say of the silly nickname most of the city referred to her as when her father was alive.
She looks up at me, eyebrows raised. “You knew of me?”
Lorenzo used to bring Marianna around with him when she wasn’t at school. I remember her trailing the man around town to meetings not fit for a teenager, looking as fearsome and composed as him.
“You were hard to miss.” When she was a teen, her near-constant presence around her father confounded me. I resented him at first for putting any child in danger, but especially a young girl. As she got older, though, she proved not to need his protection.
She was his shadow, but by the time she was eighteen, her kill count was the speculation and gossip of low-level gangsters around Boston. It was rumored she’d killed nearly twenty men before she turned twenty herself, her reputation preceding her and making her all the more a notorious mystery.
“The nickname would indicate otherwise,” she says.
“Which is why it never suited you. People don’t often think about a man’s shadow, much less fear it.”
She hums, like I’ve made a good point, then lifts her shoulders in a shrug. “Fear, maybe, but I’m not the Morelli people think about.”
I do not correct her, though I have the impulse to laugh at how wrong she is. Vanessa may be the boss of the Morelli family, and the first female boss to grace these streets, but Marianna is possibly the most clever enforcer in the state, if not the entire East Coast.
She looks away from the tall window and meets my eyes. She’s much shorter than I am, even with her tall boots, and at this distance, she has to tilt her chin up to look at me directly.
“I came to warn you away from me,” she says, getting right to it.
I blink down at her, unsure of her meaning. She doesn’t apologize for coming unannounced, at least. A relief because I would give away too much telling her that I don’t mind.
