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“How long?”

She shrugs. “Three weeks. They fed me sometimes. Threw water on me often. Smacked me around a bit. Nothing too bad, I guess.”

She looks back at the moon. “They wanted more kids. More kids who had parents who would pay.”

I already know hers didn’t pay the second time, but it breaks a part of me to know they didn’t pay the first time either.

“That how you met Vinny?”

She shakes her head. “No, it was his dad.” She looks back at me and holds my stare. “He had a team always on his kids, and when someone got too close, he questioned them. Found out their plan and found me by extension.”

She looks at her feet and starts toeing the ground, making small circles.

“They had me in New York. Took me there from the start, as they’d always planned for the Leone family to be next. So when Vinny’s dad came and botched the plan, he took me home. That’s how I was ‘saved’ the first time.”

“Ah.” I nod. “And you met the family.”

She nods. “Yeah. Sort of. Milly and I played a bit. Wasn’t there longer than a night.”

“But you left an impression.”

She shrugs. “I guess.”

I put my hands in my pockets and look at this woman before me. A beautiful, incredibly strong woman, dealt a shitty hand if there ever was one, who fights every day for her voice to matter, no matter how many times people tell her it doesn’t. Taken too many times for someone else’s gain, never her own.

And still, she can’t even fathom how memorable she really is.

Girls like her don’t get overlooked. They may be quieted for a while but never forgotten.

At least she was never forgotten by me.

Never.

Chapter 9 - Natalie

“Does Milly know?”

I shake my head. “Don’t think so. She wasn’t any older than I was, I think. Vinny remembers because he was older. Just graduated from college or something. I remember a cake saying ‘Congrats on your diploma.’”

“And you aren’t going to bring it up.” He says it for the truth it is and not the question someone would ask.

“Don’t see the point.” For her or for me. Her remembering that her father would do anything for his family, and that she had a less-than-perfect upbringing. Well, before her father was murdered a few months later.

Or for me to remember that despite doing nothing to deserve it, I was never seen as a prized possession in my father’s eyes. Eyes that looked nothing like mine.

I know my mother was pregnant before she married. Even knew that it was from her being raped by someone she didn’t know. It’s not as if the family hid it. All my life I was called kegare, “tainted.” Mixed blood was never an approved thing in the Yakuza. That both my mother and grandmother were of other races wasn’t something anyone in the family could tolerate.

I was put up with. Not cherished. Certainly not loved. Not by anyone but my mother.

She married my father to keep me safe, or so she thought. But all it did was put targets on our backs. I might have been taken, but she was left for dead in a dark alley in Chinatown. No witnesses, of course, and no one to look into her death.

I was only seven, too young to do anything but cry. Which I soon learned was an annoyance. I was sent to my room more times than not and only allowed out for school or when my father remarried. Six weeks later, to my glorious stepmother, Michiko, who brought her own daughter, Reina. But unlike me, her father was also Japanese and died protecting the head of our Yakuza family. As payment for his life, his wife was given to my father, the sole heir to the Takahashi family.

Probably helped that my stepmother would spread her legs for just about anyone if it took her to the top. More times than not, I witnessed her getting “friendly” with someone close to the family.

My father never cared who was married to him. His love was cards, nothing else.

“You look pretty tonight.”