Chapter 3

The door opened before she could take another step.

Nico Ferrante walked in like he owned the room—because in his head, he probably did. Tall, well-dressed, the kind of face that made a decent first impression if you didn't know better. Ilaria dropped the scissors and crossed the room to him in about four steps, folding into his side, her voice dropping into something soft and trembling.

I watched him take it in. Her red eyes. Her ruined makeup. The guard still sitting on the floor by the display I'd knocked him into.

He didn't look at the cameras. He looked at me.

"Pull the security feed," someone said behind him.

"Don't bother." Nico held out his hand without turning. Someone put a tablet in it. He looked at it for exactly one second, then dropped it face-down on the counter. One of his men brought something heavy down on the screen. The crack was loud in the quiet room.

"There's no footage now," he said.

He walked toward me. Unhurried. The guards holding my arms didn't move.

Up close he was exactly what the phone call had promised—someone who had never once been told no by anyone who mattered. He stopped in front of me and looked me over the way you look at a problem you're deciding how to dispose of.

Then he reached out and patted my cheek.

Not hard. That wasn't the point. The point was that he did it at all, and everyone in the room saw it, and no one said anything.

"I was willing to let this go," he said. "Ilaria gets carried away sometimes. I would have had a word with her, we could have moved on." He tilted his head. "But you had to make it difficult."

"She stole from me and lied about it," I said. "The footage you just destroyed would have shown that."

"The footage is gone." He shrugged, like I'd pointed out the weather. "And honestly? I don't care what happened. You put your hands on two of my people. That's the part I'm dealing with."

"Nico." Ilaria's voice, from somewhere behind him. "The ring."

"I know."

"It's on her. She has to have hidden it—" A pause, deliberate. "It's probably in her underwear. We should strip her down. Film it, so she can't make up a story later."

Something moved through the room. A few of the guards shifted. Nobody objected.

Nico glanced back at Ilaria, then at me. Something crossed his face that wasn't quite a smile.

"Then search her," he said. "And if there's nothing—" a small pause, casual, like he was deciding what to order for lunch, "—find another way to settle what she owes us."

The guards moved.

My arms were already pinned but they tightened their grip, pulling me off the wall and forward, into the center of the room. Ilaria walked toward me slowly, the way she'd walked with the scissors—taking her time, making sure I saw it coming. Her fingers found the collar of my shirt.

I looked past her at Nico.

"Think carefully." My voice came out steadier than I expected. "Every person in this room is making a decision right now. The whole Ferrante family will answer for what happens next."

Nico laughed. A real laugh, easy and unbothered.

"With what?" He spread his hands. "You? Go ahead."

Ilaria's grip tightened on my collar.

My phone was gone. My hands were pinned.

But Mother always knew where I was.

There was a tracker in my watch that had been there since I was seventeen, because the world we lived in was exactly the kind of world where a moment like this could happen.

Ilaria pulled.

The collar gave—

Then a sound cut through the room. Low, then overwhelming. Rotors.

The floor-to-ceiling windows lit up white all at once.

Ilaria's hand went still.

Outside, through the glare, shapes were moving. Engines. More than one.

"That's a helicopter." Ilaria's voice came out wrong—too small for the room. "In the middle of Fifth Avenue. Who has the right to do that?"