EleniI shuffle through the hangers in the walk-in closet attached to the bedroom in the city apartment Dante showed me just before everything went wrong a few weeks ago. Classes start tomorrow. Tomorrow! And I haven’t even thought about what I’m going to wear yet. Most of my things from the house have been shipped here, but as I flick through them, all I can think about is how much longer they’re going to fit me for. Leather pants? Silk camisoles? I couldn’t have picked clothes with less stretch if I wanted to.Someone leans on their horn outside, and I’ve lived here way too long to jump, but the city noises are still abrupt after so long away from them. The cell the Russians kept me in was almost completely silent, and there are no neighbors by the safehouse. I missed the noise. I think.My mind drifts to the house on Staten Island, apparently empty right now. It wasn’t silent there by any means, just quieter. Quiet enough that I should’ve been able to hear the sirens headed for bur
Dante“No,” Wing says. “We’re not getting involved.”I scowl at the four other half-lit men in the back of the mahjong house in Chinatown. “What, does he have you all by the balls?”“No,” another triad leader, Chan, replies. “We talked before you arrived. He speaks our consensus. It’s too dangerous.”I turn to Tony, expecting him to be just as shocked as I am. The fucking triads, backing down? Tony looks back at me evenly. Fuck, he’s right. I need to keep goddamn cool.“What changed?” I ask.Wing sighs. “The feds leave a wide trail.”I grimace. “Don’t tell me this is about the deaths in Brighton.”“What else?” Chan slams his hand on the table. “Feds raid the Russians, get you your girl back, and who feels the pain? Russians. You know who will hurt if we help you?”“The triads.” Wing’s voice holds an air of finality.I shake my head. “They’re eating into your territory, aren’t they?”“Territory can be recovered.” Chan folds his arms. “Lives, not so much.”I stand. “Call me if you ever
Eleni“How did you get the gradient?” Kaley leans over and points at the background of the webpage on my laptop. “I feel like CSS is organizing against me. I can’t get it to work.”I glance at the front of the classroom, where Professor Villanueva taps away at her own computer. She said we weren’t supposed to help each other with this assignment. It’s a test of our initial capabilities. But then I look back at Kaley, who clasps her hands under her chin and flutters her eyelashes. God, she can’t be twenty yet, can she? After my semesters at night school, I was able to start Tandon a little ahead of the usual freshmen, but Kaley seems so young.Something in my stomach twinges. I swallow, praying it’s not midafternoon sickness. Thankfully, the rush of saliva that always precedes my attacks doesn’t appear. This twinge is more like what I imagine the baby kicking will feel like. When it can do that. Almost like the not-quite-baby inside me is telling me I should help out another at least r
EleniI fidget with the waistband of the leggings Dante packed in the bag for me to change into before entering the prison and wish they hadn’t taken my ring. Apparently, the whole “no metal allowed” thing isn’t really negotiable. A burly woman stands on the opposite side of the table from me, one hand on her thick baton and the other on a walkie-talkie. I clear my throat.“Vanessa?”She quirks an eyebrow at me.“Hank sent me.” I feel ridiculous. All these code words…it’s like I’m in a kid’s movie, not a women’s prison upstate.Still, that makes Vanessa hit something on her walkie that dims the constant static pouring from it a second before the door buzzes loudly. I look up.Escorted by two more guards, chained wrist to wrist and ankle to ankle, Camila stumbles in through the heavy door. She’s barely recognizable. Her long, beautiful hair shines with grease in its loose bun at the back of her neck. The orange jumpsuit does the opposite of her endless whites and pastels, turning her a
DanteI lean against the wall of the elevator chugging up the building to where Eleni waits and look at myself in the shiny black reflection. My suit nearly disappears, but my face sticks out like a sore thumb. If elevator reflections can be believed, I look pale and tired. In its defense, I feel pale and tired. It’s Friday, and I’ve barely seen El all week except to pack her off to the women’s prison to talk to a psychopath who kidnapped her. Even worse, I’ve spent almost the whole week at Piacere.Just thinking about my once-beautiful club hurts. My shoes and the bottoms of my pants are gray from tramping through ash, trying to find anything in the wreckage worth salvaging. Somebody located the door to the basement, which is mostly untouched, on Wednesday, so we’ve been in and out of there constantly. I’ve got a metric fuck-ton of booze and nowhere to sell it. The stage, the lights, the bars, all gone in one blaze. Two people fucking died. Going out to Piacere every day is a nightma
EleniDante stares down at me, his black eyes burning. A laugh bubbles in my chest. Camila is dead. She can never touch either of us or the baby again.“Did I ask you to kill her?” he says quietly.If I didn’t know him well enough to recognize the lilt of play in his voice even when he’s pretending to be exactly the mafia boss I met so long ago, I’d be frightened. Instead, I smile.“Did you ask me to go to the bathroom this morning?”He grabs my chin hard. “It seems I’ve been a bit lax in your training, pet. You’re acting out.”“I’m protecting this family.” I run my tongue over the tip of his thumb. “When you couldn’t.”He knows I don’t believe that, but I watch doubt flicker in his eyes for a second. His grip loosens.“Green?” I whisper.“Are you just trying to rile me up?” he replies.I nod. “I love you.”“I love you too.” He kisses the top of my head. “Green.”His hold on me tightens again as he snaps back into his persona. “I am more than happy to remind you what happens when you
Eleni“Thank you,” Mikey, one of Dante’s older capos, says in his gravelly voice. “I know Dante’s been pulling things together for a couple weeks now, but it didn’t feel right starting things up again without toasting the kid.”I swallow against a lump in my throat and glance at one of the pictures of Seb hung in the room. “I know what you mean. And thank you for your help out here.”He raises a glass. “Hey, I’ll take the credit, but most of it belongs to my Adrianna.”His wife, a slightly tidier version of the mafia wives I’ve grown used to in Staten Island, smiles. “Don’t let Mikey trick you. He strong-armed the owner into letting us have the place on such short notice.”I raise an eyebrow. The quiet event space over the bridge in Partridge is perfect, close enough to the city to get back if something happens but far enough that we all agreed the Russians wouldn’t try to crash. That said, I’m not sure I want someone strong-armed into it.“Adri!” He laughs. “I promised to coach softb
EleniAfter the funeral, Dante is quiet in the car. The windshield wipers fill the silence between us as we sit in traffic, headed back into the city.“Do you want to see Piacere?” he asks suddenly.I pluck at the hem of my dress. My stomach is still empty, grumbling in a way I know means I’m losing the next thing I put into it too, and I’m exhausted. But the club I spent so much time in this summer, the place Dante and I really met, is gone, and I haven’t really internalized that yet. Today seems like a day of saying goodbye to things. The secret growing inside me. What Seb and I could have been to each other, if only we had the time. I may as well look at the remains of the life I thought I was going to have when I entered Piacere that first night.“Yeah.”He twists the wheel, and we pull out of the traffic headed into Manhattan for the slightly lighter traffic aimed at our island. The long silence of the drive is almost meditative. Snippets of the last few months slide through my m