Chapter 19 · Sign It Again

"Get your hands off my husband."

Nico's voice cut through the kitchen before I even registered the man gripping my collar. Sal Renzo — Nico's uncle, the one who signs off on everything Nico does, the one whose name is on the paperwork that made this marriage a job in the first place. His fingers were still bunched in my shirt when he let go, slow, like he wanted me to know he could've kept holding on.

"Your husband," Sal said, tasting the word like it was rotten, "wrote his real name on a contract that was supposed to protect him. You want to explain that, Nico, or should I?"

I hadn't moved. My back was against the fridge, the license from four months ago sitting open on the counter between us — Eli Tan, not the alias we'd built for me, not the ghost name the job called for. My actual name. In my actual handwriting.

"I explained it already," Nico said. "He knows what he did."

"He knows." Sal laughed, short and ugly. "Great. So when Marchetti's people run this marriage through a database — and they will, now that your little merger's dead in the water —