Chapter 2

The Signora didn't argue with me at the door.

She smiled at the men, said the bride needed a minute to fix her face, and steered me into a small room off the hall. A mirror, two chairs, a row of candles burning for the saints. The kind of room they kept for brides.

The second the door shut, she hit me.

The slap snapped my head sideways. My ears rang. I tasted blood on the inside of my cheek.

"You don't get to do this," she said. "Not tonight."

She forced me into the chair and went at my hair, dragging the pins out, twisting it back the way Bianca wore hers. Quick, rough hands. She'd done this to me a hundred times. Make her look like Bianca. Make her disappear.

"Sit still."

"I won't pretend to be her." I tried to stand. She shoved me back down.

"You've been pretending to be her since you were six," she said. "Don't grow a conscience about it now."

She wet a cloth and scrubbed at my face, hard, wiping me off like a mark on glass. I turned away and she caught my jaw and turned it back.

I grabbed the edge of the table to push up again — and she clamped her hand around my wrist and squeezed until the small bones ground together.

I went still.

She knew what my hands were to me. Everyone in that house did, even when they pretended not to. My mother's trade, the only thing she left me besides a face I couldn't remember. I fixed things. Watches, clasps, the tiny broken parts no one else had the patience for, alone at night when the work was mine and nobody else's.

It was the one piece of me that had never belonged to Bianca.

"Keep fighting me," the Signora said, very quiet, "and I'll make sure these hands never hold anything finer than a mop again. Try me."

She let go. I put my hands in my lap and didn't move.

"There." She went back to my hair, almost gentle now. "That wasn't so hard."

I stared at the candles and held the tears where they were.

"You always think there's a you in here somewhere." She talked while she worked, the way you talk over a coat you're brushing down. "There isn't. There never was. You were born to stand where she won't stand. That's the whole of you. Swallow it and your life gets easier."

She didn't even say it to be cruel. She said it flat, like a fact she'd checked twice. That was the part that hollowed me out. Eighteen years, and I had never once walked into a room as myself. I didn't even know what that would look like.

She pinned the veil back over my face and stepped back to check her work in the mirror.

"Perfect," she said. To the glass. Not to me.

A knock at the door.

She opened it a crack. A man stood in the hall. Broad, plain dark suit, a face that had stopped finding anything interesting a long time ago. One of the Falcones' own.

"Bride ready?"

He didn't look at me like a person. He looked at me the way you look at a crate that should already be on the truck.

"Ready," the Signora said.

And for one stupid second, something lifted in my chest. He was Falcone. He was from this house. Maybe someone here would actually look at me and see I was wrong. See I wasn't her.

He glanced over. Bored.

"Bring her."

That was it. A chip in somebody's deal, walked to the table on time.

No one in that house knew who I was. No one was going to. And the worst part, the part that scraped me clean as he turned to wait in the hall — neither did I.