“Counselor,” I say. I don’t smile. I give her my eyes and nothing else. It’s a test. Everything with me is.
She doesn’t flinch. “Mr. Conti.”
For one beat, the buzz of the lights returns like it hates being ignored. In that beat, my body remembers being a man who did not have to measure attraction against strategy. I could let the heat run without calculating its cost.
Then the beat ends. I file it under irrelevancies. She is trying to keep me in a cage. Attraction is noise. I have learned to cut noise.
Roberto hands me the pen. I sign where he taps. The ink is shiny and black as I take it across the page. My hand doesn’t shake.
The prosecutor turns to leave, efficient as a blade returning to a sheath. I watch the line of her back, the set of her shoulders, the sway of her walk.
She’ll work late tonight. She’ll drink something that burns the taste of failure out of her mouth. She’ll tell herself she did everything she could. She’ll look at my file and start another list.
She’ll learn.
“Papà,” Vito says, low. “We should go.”
“We will.” I glance at the door the judge used, another at the entrance to the hall. I remember the layout of this courtroom, despite the time between visits. Side entrance, Nico said. No press. That’s a kindness. I don’t deserve many; I take the ones I get.
I allow myself one last look at the benches. Empty space where Lucia should be glows like a sign in the dark. It’s louder than the buzz, louder than the shuffling of shoes, louder than the voices in the hall when the doors open.
I hear her laughter when she was five and wore my tie like a scarf and called it fancy. I hear her voice when she was fourteen and slammed a door, told me I didn’t understand anything about her life. I hear her on a witness stand, careful to keep the tremble out of her voice as she seals my fate. A stranger with my eyes.
Dixon bought my prison and put his shoe on my throat. He made the past four years a living hell. And he did it with my daughter on his arm, my daughter who once swore she wouldn’t let any man tell her who she was. It should have made her strong.
It made her expensive. Maybe that was always the way of it. Some daughters inherit their fathers’ crowns. Some inherit their fathers’ enemies.
I don’t say the vow out loud. I don’t need to. It lives in my mind like a habit.
Revenge is a sacred thing when you do it right—not loud, not messy. You dress it up and give it a timetable. You let it age until it stops being about the heat and starts being about the cut.
“Let’s go,” I say.
We move. Roberto in front, because of appearances. Me next. My children flanking me.
Too bad I can’t trust a single damn one of them.
Chapter Two
Elena
I fill the glass nearly to the rim and won’t apologize for it.
The wine glugs out of the bottle in a neat, expensive ribbon—something my mentor gifted me when I transferred down here. The cork sits on the counter. I won’t be putting it back in this bottle tonight.
My kitchen is the kind of place you get when you rent fast and promise yourself you’ll buy someday. Sleek and unused. Two blocks from the ocean, which I still haven’t had time to visit since moving here two months ago.
Boxes still lean against the hall. Open and rifled through when I’ve needed something. Forgotten otherwise.
I unpacked the suits, my files, and coffee equipment. And, of course, wine glasses. Everything else could wait.
I take the glass to the window and look at a slice of Atlantic City that doesn’t look like a postcard. The strip is a glittering thing in my peripheral vision, all neon and the promise of big wins.
Closer, it’s tired awnings and delivery trucks, a man with a backpack scratching a lottery ticket under a streetlamp. The ocean is just out of sight.
He walks free.
The words scrawl across my eyes in clean typeface, like I’m writing them on a report.
