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“I can handle myself just fine.”

“You only saw two of them,” he countered.

“That’s two more than most people would have noticed.”

“There were five inside the club and another team outside.”

My stomach tightened, and I covered up my reaction by taking another drink. “According to you.”

“According to the men we have in custody.”

“You expect me to believe criminals because they work for a different criminal?”

“No.” He sat back. “I expect you to look at the evidence when your hands stop shaking.”

I looked down and saw he was right. My hands were shaking. I tightened my grip on the water bottle, then placed it beside me. Sergei said nothing.

“My mother died because Raffaele decided to protect us.” I could hear the resentment and grief in my own voice, even after all these years.

Sergei’s face remained still, but his attention was fully zeroed in on me.

“Before he appeared, we were just Bianca and Alessia Caruso. We lived in my grandparents’ house in Brooklyn. My mother worked, I went to school, and no one cared who we were.” I looked out the window, watching the lights pass in bright smears across the glass. “Then someone started asking questions about me, and she called him. Within twenty-four hours, there were men outside the house, drivers waiting outside my school, guns beneath suit jackets. Suddenly, every neighbor knew we were important.”

Sergei listened without interrupting.

“That was what painted the target on us,” I continued. “Not me. Not my mother. Him. Raffaele arrived in our lives, and everyone who hated him finally knew exactly where to look.”

The memory had never softened. It still came in clear, ugly snapshots, harshly lit. One day after my father invaded our lives, a police officer was standing beneath my grandparents’ porch light. My grandmother’s hand locked around mine so tightly her rings cut into my fingers. My mother’s car was found abandoned two blocks from the pharmacy, driver’s-side window shattered, her purse sitting untouched on the passenger seat beside a bag containing toothpaste, Tylenol, and the lemon cookies she knew I liked.

Ordinary things.

That was what stayed with you after murder.

It wasn’t the flowers or the funeral or the men promising vengeance in low voices. It was that bag that never made it home, the sweater left over the back of a chair, and the half-finished cup of coffee in the sink.

“Raffaele left before we buried her,” I continued. “Matteo told us that his presence would only create more danger. My father sent flowers from Sicily and went back to protecting his empire. He chose his territory over me.”

“I’m sorry things turned out that way.”

“It’s not your place to be sorry.”

“I never said it was, but I am sorry.”

The car slowed. At first, I assumed the driver was changing lanes, but the red glow ahead stretched too far. Brake lights filled the highway in a long motionless line. Roadwork had reduced three lanes to two beside an accident involving a tractor-trailer, several police vehicles, and enough flashing lights to turn the wet pavement into a carnival of blue and red. We crawled forward, at five miles an hour, then three. Then we stopped.

Sergei’s phone rang. He answered in Russian, his attention shifting toward the driver and the line of traffic behind us.

I reached up as though adjusting my hair and slid one of the long black pins free from above my left ear. Sergei had taken the knife from the stairwell. He’d checked my robe and my shoes when we changed vehicles at a secured garage outside Stamford. He hadn’t searched my hair.

Everyone missed something.

Near the bottom of the armored door was a recessed panel no larger than a deck of cards. I hadn’t noticed it when we climbed into the second car, hidden beneath the leather trim where an ordinary passenger would never look. Emergency release, most likely. Armored vehicles still needed a way out when power failed, or fire made electronics useless.

I shifted the robe over my lap and worked the end of the pin beneath the panel.

Sergei continued speaking in Russian.

The panel lifted. A black cable rested beneath it. I curled my finger around the release and waited for the driver to brake again. A horn sounded somewhere behind us. Rain ticked lightly against the roof. The traffic beside us began moving first, creating a narrow opening between the car and the concrete divider. I pulled, and the lock disengaged with a heavy mechanical click.