Nana snapped her fingers at the shadow looming in the corner—the guard I’d brought along with me. “You see Gino over there? He once removed a man’s spleen with a steak knife.”
Gino lifted his hand in a polite half-wave. I blinked.
Grandmother leaned forward. “We are offering you an out. Not because you asked for one. Not because we want anything from you. But because you are family now.Whether you marry Ivan or run off into the sunset with a goat farmer is irrelevant to us.”
“A goat farmer?” I whispered.
“Well,” Nana shrugged, “the quiet ones are always the freaks.”
A hysterical laugh burst out of me before I could stop it. Tears gathered in the corners of my eyes—not from sadness but from the sheer absurdity of sitting between two elderly women in a male strip club while discussing sex trafficking, murder contracts, and goat farmers.
Grandmother reached into her purse—an elegant white clutch that didn’t match the neon hellscape around us—and slid a small envelope across the table.
“This,” she said, tapping it once, “is everything we have on Donovan, your brothers, your father, and the Maddens’ trafficking enterprises. Documentation. Account numbers. Correspondence. Contracts.”
My fingers trembled as I stared at it.
“Why give this to me?” I asked again, voice barely a whisper.
Grandmother’s smile softened into something devastatingly maternal. “Because truth is power, darling. And right now, you’re walking into war without armor.”
“And because,” Nana added, “Ivan loves you. My God, the amount of brooding that boy does—honestly, I could slap him.”
I pressed my lips together, my heart squeezing so hard it felt bruised.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with all this,” I choked out.
Grandmother’s expression turned steel. “You survive. You take your sister. You get through this wedding. And when the moment is right—when Donovan believes he has won—you kill the king.”
Nana lifted her martini glass like we were making a toast. “And we will handle disposing of the body.”
My breath stuttered.
“You’d help me kill him?” I whispered.
“No,” Nana corrected firmly. “We would help you make sure he never hurts another girl.”
Grandmother’s fingers wrapped gently around mine. “Sweetheart… sometimes good women have to do terrible things. Your mother and brothers were born cruel. You were not. That is precisely why Donovan fears you. That is why the Maddens wanted to buy you. And that,” she squeezed my hand, “is why you will win.”
Something in my chest broke open—fear and fury and grief and purpose all merging into one violent, electric pulse.
I stared at the envelope.
At the truth.
“I’ll do it,” I whispered.
Both women smiled like they had been waiting for that answer all night.
“Oh, darling,” Nana purred, reaching for her martini. “We knew you would.”
***
I stumbled into Emeline Cristof’s penthouse drunk as askunk and tripping over my own feet. The grannies insisted I cut loose for once, that I needed it, and that they would look over me while I finally took the edge off. It felt good.
A giggle escaped my lips as I fought with my heels. Gino had tried to help me out of the elevator, but I waved him off. I didn’t want anyone to think I’d taken him home with me. All of the men in the lobby knew who Gino was, but I wasn’t so sure Jane or Emeline knew him or his face.
“Wow,” A voice I didn’t recognize said from the couch and I stopped hopping around like an idiot. “I never thought I’d see your love’s vagina, but I guess there’s a first for everything.”
