PROLOGUE
Harmony (age 17)
They called it the dock like it was ordinary. As if it were just planks and pilings, not a ledger where the town’s sins were written down in water. The boards were gray as bone and slick with old winters. The river lay flat and black beside us, a closed eye that didn’t miss anything. Trucks idled in a neat line, their exhaust turning to ghosts that drifted over the November dark night.
Our house, the Bellerose mansion, with the bulletproof windows and floors that never held warmth, sat high on the bluff above the trees. But when my father wanted to teach, he took us down here where voices carried, then disappeared.
“Family first,”Dadsaid, soft and satisfied, like blessing bread. “Eyes open. Mouthclosed.”
He wore the late fall like it was a suit he’d ordered custom with dark wool, neat gloves, and a hat that didn’t dare muss his hair. Men bent toward him the way grass leans before a storm, without ever deciding to. I wrapped both hands around the strap ofMom’s cooler, old and plaid, the one she used to pack with lemonade and lemon tarts. Tonight, it heldcash tied in rubber bands so tight the edges bit. I knew it was weird of me to take thecooler to hold the cash but it felt like a piece of her was with me, keeping me safe, even if she couldn’t keep herself safe.
Olivier, my brother,stood a step behind me. Twenty. Taller. A jaw that belonged to our father and a look that said he’d already swallowed the lesson and found it tasted like power. He finished high school and went straight into the “family business,” without ever calling it that. I loved him dearly, but I was slowly watching him turn into a man I no longer respected, our father. Headlights slid over the dock. A truck door thumped shut.Nicocame toward us with a grin that had gotten him everything he didn’t deserve since he turned fifteen. He’d been my boyfriend for a while now. When I saw Nico, I remembered hot July nights, lake water, kissing on the back steps while the house slept. It had been easy to forget things on those nights, like gravity and consequences and who, exactly, my father was. In daylight, forgetting got harder.
“Mr. Bellerose,” Nico said respectfully. He kept his chin up and his eyes lowered, like he’d practiced in a mirror. “I brought what you asked.”
Dad didn’t bother to look at him. He looked at me. “Bring it,” he said, and the training started there, do what’s asked and don’t ask why.
I stepped forward. The river breathed up cold and my knees wanted to shiver. I told them there was no time to show weakness now. The handoff was quiet, the choreography learned by watching for years. No names. No counting you could see. Weight slid from my palms to another man’s hands, and I watched as the stacks vanished into a duffel that wouldn’t exist by morning.
I set the cooler down and tried hard not to think aboutlemon peelsticking to my teeth, sugar hissing under a torch, my mother’s laugh when she’d say,“Even pretty things have spines, bébé,” and pressed athistleinto my palm. I didn’t think aboutthe card where she’d written her recipe in looping blue ink. I kept that card in a cookbook tucked behind the flour in the mansion’s kitchen, as if paper could still make heat.
“Again,” Dad said.
We repeated the steps with the next truck.Nicohovered near me, eager without touching while learning how to be useful. “You okay, Harm?” he whispered.
“Dandy,” I said. “Freezing at the river with other people’s mistakes. Dream night.”
He laughed like we were flirting. “It’s not mistakes. It’s business.”
“It’s both,” I said, and Dad’s mouth twitched at the edge like he’d almost smiled, which meant I’d almost been careless.
On the last run, the driver was new and too talkative. “We’re square,” he said. “You won’t hear my name again.”
“You’re right,” my father answered, and the driver laughed like he’d heard a joke. He was probably trying not to piss himself.
When it was over, we climbed back up toward gravel. Olivier fell in beside Dad, the loyal heir.Nicomatched my pace like he belonged there. “Come out after school tomorrow,” he said, low. “Your dad’s cool with me being around.”
“Is he?” I said flatly.
“He says I show potential.”
“In what?” I asked. I wanted him to say it aloud so he could hear himself.
“Opportunity,” he said after a beat because he’d learned that word tasted better than the others.
“Right.”
He gave me a look like I was being dramatic for effect. Maybe I was. Or maybe I could see the end of the road he’d just started down, and it looked like a shut door. Themansionglowed in the bare trees, as if light could make it kind. Inside, the marbleentryway held its own echo. The portraits on the wall watched like they were waiting to be pleased.Olivieropened the kitchen door and turned on the pendant light, as if he owned the sun.
“Useful,” Dad told me, removing his gloves finger by finger like a ritual. “Steady hands.”
“I’m not cargo,” I said. It slid out before I could stop it.
He studied me for the kind of second that lasts a year. Then he smiled the way a person smiles when their teeth are a tool. “No. You’re aBellerose.” Dad went for the cabinet with the flour where I kept the cookbook. He lifted itby the cracked spine, slid therecipe cardout an inch so I could see my mother’s handwriting catch the light, then tucked it back with a gentle tap. “Your mother forgot who we are,” he said mildly. “People die when they forget.” I thought I had hidden the card well, but you can’t hide from Marcel Bellerose.
“She died because somebody wanted to hurt you,” I said. “Not because she forgot.”
He touched the edge of my shoulder. A small, calculated gesture that read as affection if you didn’t know its postscript. “Roles,” he said. “I speak so you don’t have to. I carry so you don’t. Eyes open. Mouth closed.” He kissed the top of my head like a blessing that didn’t bless, then toldOlivierto bringNicoby tomorrow.
