I kept reading. She'd been spotted leaving in a car with a friend. The friend had since died of mysterious causes. Cecilia Avola was listed as a missing person, but everyone who could read between lines knew what that meant. She wasn't missing. She was hiding. And her father wasn't worried. He was angry.
"This is from a month ago. Why are we just hearing of this now?"
"It just came across my desk. Allegro Esposito from Boston has been keeping an eye on it for us." He took the paper from me and I walked to my father's office — my office, I was still working on that — and took my seat behind the desk. "There's more."
"Tell me."
"She's in Chicago."
I looked up from the desk. "She's what?"
"She came here from Italy and has been living in a small apartment on the east side." He opened his file folder and set out photographs and papers documenting her comings and goings for the past month. I looked at them without touching them. A woman walking to work. A woman at a market. A woman with her head down, moving through the city like someone who had learned to take up as little space as possible. "She's found a job at a coffee shop. They must be paying her under the table because she'd have no work visa. She goes to work and to the market. There are no friends, she doesn't go out." He paused. "It's like she's hiding in plain sight."
A rival family's daughter had been living in my city for a month and I hadn't known about it. I filed that particular failure away to deal with later, because right now there was a more immediate problem.
I picked up one of the photographs. A close-up, clearly taken from a distance. She was stunning in the uncomplicated way that made you look twice and then keep looking — long dark hair almost to her waist, a posture that spoke of a particular kind ofupbringing even in a coffee shop apron. There was something careful in her expression. Watchful.
I knew that look.
I'd seen it on my sister's face for years before Eleanor finally ran.
She'd been arranged to marry one of my father's most trusted lieutenants, a man who had been around our table since before I could remember. Someone we'd all assumed was loyal, honorable, worthy of the Venosa name. Eleanor had known differently. She'd told me once, quietly, that the way he looked at her made her feel like something he was waiting to own, and I'd dismissed it because I hadn't wanted it to be true.
I didn't dismiss it the night she came to me at two in the morning with her bag already packed.
I walked her to the tunnels myself. The old passages beneath the house that my great-grandfather had built into the foundation, that every Venosa child grew up knowing about and was sworn never to speak of outside the family. I stood at the entrance and watched her disappear into the dark without looking back, and I didn't sleep for three days afterward wondering if I'd done the right thing.
She'd ended up at the Drake Marriage Auction. Bought by Walker Drake himself, which was either fortune or fate depending on how you looked at it. She was alive and beyond reach, which was the best outcome I could have hoped for and still somehow felt like loss.
My father had dealt with the lieutenant when the man couldn't stop running his mouth about Eleanor's disappearance. The matter was closed. But the particular weight of watching a woman flee a life that should have protected her — that never fully left you.
I looked back down at the photograph of Cecilia Avola.
"Too bad she's an Avola," I said, more to myself than to Emilio.
"True." He settled back in his chair. "But you do have the upper hand here, Constantine." I tore my eyes from the photograph. "She's in trouble. The friend who helped her escape is dead — not that I think she knows that — but what do you think will happen when old man Avola finds her?" He let that sit for a moment. "She's betrothed to Hector Lombardi."
The name landed like a stone in still water.
I set the photograph down.
Hector Lombardi was my mother's oldest brother, and the reason my mother flinched at sudden movements and never spoke about her childhood if she could avoid it. He was sixty-three years old and had buried two wives under circumstances that everyone discussed and nobody investigated. He was a man who understood power as something to be exercised against those who couldn't fight back, and he had spent his entire life finding new ways to prove it.
"Find her," I said. My voice came out harder than I intended.
Emilio nodded and stood.
"Where's my dad off to like he has a rocket up his ass?" Lorenzo walked in and dropped into the chair his father had just vacated, with the particular ease of a man who had never in his life considered whether he was welcome somewhere. He was my oldest friend and my right hand, and he operated on the assumption that wherever I was, he was welcome, which was generally true.
"We have a situation in the city." I leaned back and looked at him. He was already reading something in my expression, the way he'd learned to over twenty years.
"What kind? When do we roll out?"
"Not yet." I looked back down at the photograph on my desk. The careful eyes of a woman who had done something very braveand very dangerous and was holding her breath waiting to find out if it had worked.
"Who is she?"
"Cecilia Avola."
