Chapter Thirteen
STEPHANIE HAD A GOOD life these past few years. A really good life.
Her own apartment, twelfth floor, river view, the kind of building with a man downstairs whose whole job was opening the door and remembering your name.
Her own car, paid in full, red as a dare.
Enough money to party all night, sleep until the afternoon forgave her, and still not worry about a thing.
It was an almost perfect life, except for the fact that she worried all the time.
She was very good at hiding it. She'd had a lifetime of practice at hiding things, and nobody at the parties ever noticed how she took the seat facing the door, or how she never used the same valet twice, or how a black car idling too long outside a restaurant could end her appetite for the evening.
She hid it beautifully. But it never went away, because she'd grown up where she'd grown up, and everyone from those streets had heard the saying.
She tried not to think about the saying.
Stephanie had come up hard. The streets first, then worse than the streets, then college, which she'd whored her way into and through and never once apologized for, because nobody had ever handed her anything and the world could keep its opinions.
It had been a shitty life, top to bottom, up until the day she got hired by Viktor Biancardi to look after his secret little sister.
Easiest job in the world, on paper. Enroll, befriend, watch, report.
Report on her health, her grades, her happiness, but never, and he had been strict about this in a way Stephanie only understood much later, never where.
Viktor Biancardi paid a fortune to know everything about his sister except the one thing anyone could ever torture out of him.
The money appeared on time, the instructions were simple, and the girl, the girl, made it effortless, because Aislinn trusted people the way rain fell, naturally, on everyone, without checking credentials.
Within a month Stephanie had the seat beside her in two classes.
Within three she had a standing study date and half of Aislinn's lunch, every day, split without being asked, because that was apparently just a thing Aislinn did.
It was the best life possible. She should never have had a single problem.
But she couldn't get rid of the envy.
She'd tried. That was the part no one would ever believe, she had honestly tried, because even she could see the math made no sense.
Stephanie had the salary and the secret and the whole hidden machinery of a powerful man behind her, and Aislinn had a scholarship, a bus pass, and secondhand textbooks.
There was nothing to envy. There was nothing to envy, and Stephanie envied her anyway, every single day, with a low, tidal, unkillable resentment, because Aislinn had the one thing Stephanie could never steal, buy, or fake.
People loved her for no reason. A brother she didn't even know existed was paying strangers to keep her safe.
A whole life of nothing, and she walked through it like someone rich.
Aislinn saw her as a real friend. That was the worst part. She really, truly did.
Stephanie just couldn't help it.
So when the letter came, the one with Viktor Biancardi's instructions in it, and the money, more money than all the previous years combined, she couldn't help that either.
The letter said to make the sister disappear.
The letter said to keep her safe and hidden and provided for.
And the last instruction, underlined twice, was that from this day forward, Stephanie was to hide the girl from Viktor Biancardi himself.
She took the money. Those were the instructions, more or less.
Make the sister disappear. Keep her safe.
Keep her hidden. Stephanie followed them.
She simply chose the how. And the how she chose, she chose to kill her envy for good.
She sat down across a library table from the kindest person she'd ever met and, gently, thoroughly, destroyed Aislinn's life.
She thought she'd be happy after that.
She wasn't.
The envy died, eventually. The worry replaced it, moved into the same room, slept in the same bed, and the worry was worse, because the envy had only ever hurt Aislinn.
And in the quietest hour of every good long night in her good new life, Stephanie lay in her twelfth-floor bedroom with her river view and heard the saying again, in the voice of every street she'd ever survived.
Once you crossed someone who was famiglia...
Famiglia will be after you, all the way to hell.
THEY LEFT LOUIS IN Minna's care, which Louis accepted on the condition of a rematch, having lost to his aunt at chess the night before by what he described, darkly, as "a technicality" and what Minna described as "checkmate."
In the car, Valerio watched Aislinn not be okay.
She was doing it very well, the way she did everything, hands folded, spine schooled, face arranged.
But her thumb kept moving over her knuckles in small circles, around and around, and she was looking out the window at nothing with the fixed attention people give to nothing when the something is too big, and eight years ago he would've missed it. He'd missed so much, eight years ago.
He wasn't in the business of missing things anymore.
"Aislinn."
"Hm? I'm fine."
So he kissed her.
It was meant as a distraction, that was all, an interruption of the circling thumb, a change of subject conducted by other means, and it worked immediately, her breath catching, her hands coming up to his chest. The problem, he discovered, was that it worked on the wrong person as well.
Eight years had opinions, and she made a small sound against his mouth, and the strategy dissolved with the strategist still inside it.
"The divider," she managed.
"Has been up since we left."
"The windows—"
"Cannot be solved from outside." He said it against her jaw, already easing her across his lap, and felt rather than heard her laugh, that impossible laugh, nerves and joy in one body, and then the laugh went away and something better replaced it.
After that, the city drove by unwatched.
It was slower this time, and quieter, her hands in his hair and his name kept low, like a secret from the front seat, and when she came apart it was with her face pressed into his throat and his arms locked around her like the vehicle might try to take her somewhere, and for a long few minutes afterward they simply stayed like that, tangled and rumpled and sixteen again, her heartbeat arguing against his.
"We are in a car," Aislinn said finally, into his collar, scandalized at both of them approximately eight minutes too late.
"We are."
"I'm a mother."
"Demonstrably."
She laughed, wobbly and warm, and swatted him without any force at all, and she was still in his lap with her hair ruined when her phone rang.
She fished it out of the seat, glanced at the screen, and every drop of the warmth left her face at once.
Stephanie, the screen said.
Her friend from college was calling.