Chapter 1 · Untitled Chapter

The gun went off and my father's right hand came apart on the table like a dropped plate.

He didn't scream. That was the worst part. He just looked at the ruin of his fingers, then at me, and I understood he was already doing the math on what I was worth.

"Sign," Lucian Corvo said.

He hadn't raised his voice once. He stood at the head of my mother's dining table in a black coat that hadn't picked up a single drop of blood, and he slid a folder across the wood with two fingers, the way you'd push a plate of food toward a dog you didn't like.

Three hundred and sixty-five days. One year of my life, my name, my bed. Signed over to the man who'd put my family in the ground.

"Where's Mia?" My voice came out steadier than it had any right to. "I'm not touching that pen until I see my sister."

He lifted his phone, turned the screen toward me, and my knees nearly quit.

Mia. Nineteen years old, still in her campus hoodie, a smear of charcoal on her jaw from her drafting class. Sitting on a folding chair in a concrete room with two of his men behind her and a coil of chain on the floor by her sneakers. Chain, and the iron weights they use on the fishing boats.

"The sound is forty feet deep off the north pier," Lucian said. "Cold this time of year. She'd last about ninety seconds."

"You're a monster."

"I'm a businessman." He set the pen down beside the contract, perfectly straight, like a surgeon laying out an instrument. "Monsters don't offer terms, Bianca. Sit down."

My father made a wet sound behind me. Begging, maybe. He'd never begged for me before.

I sat down. I picked up the pen.

The nib scratched. My hand shook so hard the first letter looked like a seizure.

"Again," Lucian said. "Clean. I'm not having a lawyer say you signed under duress."

I almost laughed. A gun was still smoking on my mother's table, and he was worried about a lawyer.

Then I felt it. Cold metal, right at the base of my skull, just under my braid. One of his men had come up behind my chair without a sound.

"He's not asking twice," Lucian said.

I breathed through my nose. I counted the way my mother taught me when I was little, in four-part primes, because primes don't let you panic. Two. Three. Five. Seven.

I wrote my name. *Bianca Marie De Luca.* The last time I'd ever write it.

He took the page and read every line of it. Slowly. Like he had all night and I had nowhere to be. Behind me my father had slid down the chair leg, cradling his hand against his shirt, and nobody had bothered to call a doctor.

"Papa," I said, without turning around.

"Don't," he whispered. "Don't look at me, *piccola*. Just do what he says."

There it was. The most useful thing he'd ever told me, and he'd said it while bleeding on my mother's rug.

"Now the ring."

Lucian reached into his coat. The box was black velvet, and it was the size of a matchbook. When he flipped it open, the stone caught the chandelier and threw a hard white spark across the ceiling. Eight carats, easy. It looked like something you'd pull off a corpse.

"Hand."

"I can put my own ring on."

"Hand, Bianca."

I held it out. I wanted to keep it flat and still, a woman who didn't care. It trembled anyway, and he saw that and didn't say a word, which was somehow worse.

His fingers closed around mine. Warm. His skin was warm, and I hated that. I'd expected something cold and scaled. Instead his thumb dragged over my knuckles, rough at the pad, and the ring went on and bit at the joint like it was too tight on purpose.

"There," he said quietly. "Now everyone knows whose you are."

"I'm nobody's."

"You're mine for three hundred and sixty-four more nights." He still held my hand. "Tonight counts as the first."

My stomach dropped. I made my face go blank, the way I'd learned to in this house, where a flinch was just an invitation. "You said a year. You didn't say tonight."

"Read the contract."

"I *did* read the contract."

"Then you know I don't repeat myself."

I'd read page four. Clause nine. *The wife shall reside at the Husband's residence and be available to him at his discretion.* I'd read it three times, and every time my brain had slid right off the word *available*, like a fingernail on glass.

Now he pulled me up out of the chair by that hand. Not rough. Worse. Easy, like I weighed nothing, like he'd done it a thousand times to a thousand women. My chair skidded back and hit my father's knee. He grunted.

I got one good look at Lucian's face then. Dark eyes. A thin white scar through his left eyebrow. A mouth that looked almost gentle, which didn't match a single other thing about him.

"You'll want to say something clever," he said. "Go ahead. Get it out of your system."

"I hope the sound takes you."

"It already tried."

Something moved behind his eyes when he said it. Something old and ugly. I didn't have time to wonder what, because his free hand slid under my jaw and tipped my face up.

"Don't," I said.

"Seal it."

"*Don't.*"

He kissed me.

It wasn't a kiss. It was a stamp. Hard mouth, no tenderness, his thumb pressing under my chin so I couldn't turn away. I tasted coffee and gun oil. My teeth clicked against his. I kept my eyes open on purpose, glaring up into his, because if I closed them I'd have to admit I was in it.

My heart was going like a rabbit's. That part was fear. It had to be fear.

When he let go, my lip stung. I'd bitten it. I could taste copper.

He looked at my mouth for one beat too long. Then he wiped his own thumb across his bottom lip, saw the red on it, and his jaw tightened like I'd done it to him.

"Nobody touches her," he told the room. "Nobody speaks to her. She goes in my car."

"And Mia?" I grabbed his sleeve. I'd never grabbed anything of his, and the wool felt expensive under my fist. "You said she walks if I sign. You *said.*"

"She's already on the road to the tower. Alive. Dry." His eyes dropped to my fist, and I let go. "You keep your end, I keep mine. That's the only kind of honest man I am."

He turned me by the elbow and walked me toward the foyer. Past my mother's portrait. Past the broken umbrella stand I'd been meaning to fix since spring. Through the front doors, where the rain was coming in sideways and two black SUVs sat idling in the drive with their wipers going.

The ceramic blade was still strapped to my thigh under my dress. I could feel it with every step. Four inches of white, and no way in hell I'd get it out before six guns found me.

Not yet.

Lucian's earpiece crackled.

He stopped dead. His hand tightened on my arm until I felt the bones grind. A voice hissed through the little speaker, thin and fast, and I only caught half of it.

*"…the bridge… Boss, they're on the bridge…"*

Gunfire, then. Not near. Far enough to sound like popcorn.

Lucian didn't look at me. He looked at the road.

"Change of plans," he said, and shoved me hard toward the first car. "Get in. Now."