Chapter 3

The man didn't take me to the ceremony.

He pulled me into a room off the main hall — smaller, a desk, no guests — and shut the door. Then he lifted my veil to get a look at the bride his family was being handed.

He went still.

"You're not her."

I wasn't fast enough to answer. He'd seen Bianca's photographs. Everyone in his world had. And I was close — same hair, same build, eighteen years of being close — but up under the light I was not Bianca Marchetti, and he knew it in a second.

His face changed. Not to confusion. To insult.

"They sent us a fake." He said it slow, like he couldn't believe the nerve. "Marchetti dressed up a servant and sent her to the Falcones."

"I'm not—" I tried. "They made me come, I'm a stand-in, I'm not—"

The back of his hand caught my mouth. My head snapped sideways. Blood again, warm against my teeth.

"Don't," he said. "Don't open that mouth again."

That was the worst part. The only true thing I had to say was that I was nobody. A nothing they'd dressed up to fool him. And nobody was exactly the thing that got you hurt in a house like this.

He took my right hand and turned it over in his, almost careful, looking at the fingers.

"Marchetti thinks we can't tell the difference," he said. "Let's send them back something they'll understand."

I knew what he meant a second before he did it. I tried to pull away. He held on.

There was a crack, small and final.

I screamed. I couldn't stop it. My right hand — my one good hand, the only thing that was ever mine — bent wrong now, the fingers gone where fingers don't go.

I was still screaming when his other hand closed over my throat and pressed, just enough.

"Quiet," he said. "The don's coming through."

The room tipped. When he let go I couldn't pull a full breath, couldn't push my voice past a torn, scraping wheeze. Whatever I had left to say was gone with it.

The door opened.

A man came in, and the room went quiet around him before he said a word. Dark coat, hard face, the kind of stillness that made everyone else shrink. He didn't have to tell anyone who he was. The way my man straightened told me everything.

This was the one they were marrying me to. The Falcone the whole city said quietly.

He looked at the room. At me on the floor — ruined hand, torn dress, blood on my mouth, nothing like the bride he'd been promised.

"What is this." Flat. Not really a question.

"Marchetti sent a stand-in," the other man said quickly. "A fake, boss. An insult. I was handling it."

The don looked at me for half a second, the way you look at a stain someone else gets to clean up.

"Send it back to them," he said. "In whatever shape it's in."

He turned to go.

No.

I couldn't speak. I couldn't stand. My hand was useless and my voice was gone and he was walking away, and there was nothing left in me to throw at him —

except the one thing that was mine.

With my left hand I tore the chain off my wrist and threw it. Hard. After him.

The little silver locket hit the marble and skittered, ringing across the floor, and came to rest against his shoe.

He stopped.

He looked down. At the locket by his foot. At the small worn crest pressed into the silver.

Then he crouched and picked it up, and a man like that does not crouch for anything.

He turned it over once in his fingers. Looked at the back of it. And when he raised his head this time, he was looking at me like he'd seen me somewhere before.