But it’s not a list. It’s a video.
I squint to get a better look. There’s a diner on the screen, shot from a camera up in the corner, and I’d recognize that person anywhere. My father. He’s at a booth near the window with a coffee in front of him, talking to a man who’s looking through the window. I know who it is before he even turns his head.
Adriano.
“What is this?” I ask, unable to look away from the screen.
My father smiles at Adriano, and they talk for a while like two men who like each other. Adriano reaches into his jacket, and I lean closer to the little screen.
My father jerks back against the window, his hand going to his chest, and the coffee cup tips over and spills across the table. Adriano gets up, calm as anything, and the footage cuts off there.
I watch the last frame, the coffee dripping off the edge of the table.
I laugh until I have to lean back against the stone wall so I don’t fall over, and Amalia watches me with her head tilted, as if she’s trying to figure out if I’ve lost my mind. Maybe I have. But the man who told me my whole life that I wasn’t worthy and who handed his name and everything to a boy he found in the gutter, is dead in a diner booth, shot by the very son he loved best.
I run a hand over my face and let out a breath I think I’ve been holding for years. He wanted to leave Adriano everything. His name, the territory, and all of it, and he said so to my face plenty of times, so I spent half my life trying to be good enough for a man who’d already made up his mind about me. And in the end, his favorite put a bullet in him. There’s something almost funny about that, and the grin spreads over my lips.
“You’re not upset,” she says.
“Should I be?” I shrug as best I can with my hands cuffed. “He spent years telling me I was worth less than a boy he picked up off the street. So no, I’m not crying about it.”
She studies me for a moment. I’ve got plenty to enjoy here, like the thought of my father bleeding out next to his cold coffee while Adriano strolled off. The relief of it surprises me. Part of me expected to be upset, since Adriano took even this from me, but what comes up instead is light, easy, and almost giddy.
“I thought you’d want revenge,” she says, and she tucks the phone away. “Most men in your position would. Your father is dead, and your brother roaming around free after pulling the trigger. That’s the sort of thing a man can spend his whole life chasing.”
“He’s not my brother.” The words come fast, an edge in them. “He never was. My father just liked to pretend.”
“Even so.”
I want to argue, but the strange thing is that when I reach for the rage I’ve carried around for as long as I can remember, it’s not there. Adriano took my father from me, except my father belonged to himself and to Adriano, never to me, so what exactly did he take? I think about hunting Adriano down, putting a bullet in him like he put one in the old man, and I wait for the hunger to rise up in me like it always has.
But there’s just... emptiness.
“Maybe I would’ve cared once,” I admit, and I’m a little surprised I’m saying it out loud. “But I don’t see the point anymore.”
She moves a step closer, and I get a proper look at her in the dim light of the cell. Dark brown hair, dark brown eyes. She’s beautiful in a hard, sure way, like a woman used to people doing what she tells them, and there’s a steadiness to her that most of the men I’ve known would kill to have. I find myself wanting to know what she’s thinking, which is a dangerous thing to want from the person holding your chains.
“I have an offer for you,” she says.
“I’m listening. It’s not like I’ve got somewhere to be.”
“Marry me.”
I blink at her, certain I’ve heard it wrong. A woman I met yesterday in a dungeon, in front of me, asking me to marry her as if she’s asking me to pass the salt. I open my mouth, then close it, because for once in my life I don’t have a clever thing to say.
“You want to...” I shake my head. “Why would you want to marry me? You don’t even know me.”
“I don’t need to know you.” She folds her arms. “I need a face the men out there can follow. They won’t take orders from awoman, but they’ll take them from her husband, and you’ve got the name and the looks for it. That’s all you’d be. A face.”
“So I’d be a puppet.”
“You’d be alive,” she says, “which is more than you can say right now.”
I almost smile, because at least she’s honest about it. Most people dress these things up. She just lays it out on the table like it is.
“And I’d be in charge,” she says. “All of it. Every decision, every order, every move we make... You’d do exactly what I say, when I say it, and you wouldn’t question me in front of the men or behind their backs. If I tell you to smile, you smile. If I tell you to shut your mouth, you don’t say a word.”
“You want a husband or a dog?” I raise an eyebrow at her.
