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He never did because I was a kid.

The worst was Vittoria's nineteenth birthday. I'd grown into myself by then. I knew what I looked like, and I learned exactly how to use it. I wore a green dress that night specifically because I'd decided that was the year Valentino Conti would finally notice I was not a child anymore.

I found him on the terrace. He had a glass of wine in one hand, and the other on the bare shoulder of some woman in red as he leaned down to say something that made her laugh. His thumb moved on her skin. Slow. Easy. Like he'd done it a hundred times.

And he glanced up and saw me standing there in my green dress with my whole heart in my eyes, and he nodded.

He nodded. The way you nod at a kid you half-recognize. Then he turned back to the woman in red.

I drank too much that night and let a boy from Northwestern take me home. Somewhere in the back of his car I figured out the thing that would run the next six years of my life. Being wanted. Having someone's undivided attention. It feels almost the same, and if you don't think too hard—if you keep moving fast enough, you never have to notice that almost isn't the same at all.

So I had sex. A lot of it. With men I only used for a moment. Men who were leaving or married or boring. Men I picked precisely because they wouldn't last long enough to disappoint me.

I liked it. I tell people I like sex and that's true. It's just not the whole truth. The real truth is that I like the moment a man looks at me like I set him on fire. The rest is just the part you have to get through.

Vittoria knew about the crush. We talked about it once, years later, two glasses of wine deep on her couch and laughed like it was a funny old photograph. A teenager thing. A schoolgirl thing. The crushes girls have when they're fifteen, she'd called it, and I'd laughed too and agreed, because what was I going to say?

That it never actually went away?

That I just got better at hiding it, the way I get better at hiding everything—behind the dress, behind the joke, behind the camera-ready smile?

Valentino

"You're certain," I say.

"As certain as I get without a signed confession." Luca's voice is flat. "The warehouse near Monza. Two trucks last night. The manifest says textiles. The trucks left empty of textiles and full of something that breathes."

I close my eyes. The hotel room is too warm.

"Basile?"

"Aldo Basile. His name is on a lease two shells deep. Sloppy. The young ones always think distance is the same as protection." A pause. "It's him, Valentino. The girls go in, fewer come out. He's running it through the agency. The modeling work is the cover and the catch at the same time."

"Send it to Bruno," I say as I open my eyes. "All of it. Photographs, the lease chain, the manifests. Everything."

"Already done. He has it now." Another longer pause. "What do you think he'll say?"

"I don't know." And I don't. But Aldo is a Don's son, and killing a Don's son is a war. Bruno is the kind of man who counts the cost before he swings. "He'll decide. Until then, we watch and we wait."

I stand in front of the mirror longer than I need to.

The man looking back at me is forty chapters of discipline. A man who does not cross lines, who has built a whole life out of holding the line for other people. Because once he failed to do so... A very long time ago, in a village where a girl screamed, and he could not help her fast enough.

That man does not put his hand around a woman's throat.

But I did. I felt her pulse jump under my thumb. I asked her a question that had nothing to do with logistics.

And then she moaned.

The sound has not left me. It lives somewhere behind my ribs now, low and patient, and it surfaces at the worst times. When it does, I have to stop, press my hands against something solid, and breathe slow and deep, forcing my mind anywhere else.

I force my fingers steady and button my waistcoat. Tonight is work. Tonight I am the family's instrument, sent to a room full of fashion professionals and bought senators and the soft machinery that hides a thing like Aldo Basile in plain sight. I will smile at the appropriate times, I will note who speaks to whom, and I will keep Amanda White in my line of sight because she is a civilian in a building full of wolves. I slide my father's watch onto my left wrist and feel the familiar weight settle. I check the gun at the small of my back, then the second one at my ankle.

I will be professional.

I am very good at being professional. It is, in fact, the only thing I have ever truly been good at.

CHAPTER NINE