Chapter Fourteen
THE FIRST CALL TOOK four minutes.
Stephanie made it from her kitchen island with a glass of wine she didn't drink, to a number she'd sworn she'd never need again, and the voice that answered still remembered her, which was either flattering or terrible, she'd decide later.
The order was simple and she kept her own voice bored while she gave it, the way you were supposed to, no names on the line, just a description, an address in a bad building, a schedule.
A single mother, she said. Walks home late from work. No one will look very hard.
The voice quoted a price. She doubled it for speed.
It wasn't personal, she told herself, ending the call, and almost laughed at herself, because of course it was personal, it had been personal for eleven years.
But it was also just cold math now. Aislinn had been seen on Valerio Le Sabre's arm in front of half of society, and men like Le Sabre pulled threads for a hobby, and every thread in that woman's life ran backward through a library table straight to Stephanie's hands.
The math only worked one way. The dupe had to go before anyone thought to ask the dupe any questions.
One loose end. Then the good life got to keep being good.
She topped up the wine she wasn't drinking, arranged herself on the sofa, and made the second call.
Aislinn picked up on the third ring, and her voice came through warm as ever, warm like eleven years hadn't passed, warm like a person leaving her lunch open on the table for whoever needed half.
"Steph! I was just thinking about you."
"Liar," Stephanie said fondly, and settled in. "You're famous, you know that? You're in two feeds and a group chat. A billionaire, Ais. You have to tell me everything."
And Aislinn laughed, embarrassed, and told her almost nothing, which was so exactly like her that Stephanie could've screamed, and instead she cooed and coaxed and drew little circles on the sofa arm with one fingernail.
It's all been so fast, Aislinn said. It's complicated, Aislinn said.
I want to tell you properly, not on the phone, Aislinn said, and Stephanie smiled at the ceiling. Dupe.
Still. After everything, after eight years, a deepfake, and a library table, the girl was still a dupe, still worrying about telling her properly, and the old envy stirred in its sleep one more time, because how, how did a person stay this soft and keep surviving—
"Soon, though," Aislinn was saying. "We'll talk soon, Steph. I promise."
"Soon," Stephanie agreed. "Take care of yourself, babe."
She ended the call.
The apartment was very quiet for exactly one second.
Then, from three places in the darkness around her, came the sound her whole childhood knew before her mind caught up, oiled, mechanical, slow, the sound of guns being cocked, and every lamp in her apartment came on at once.
The wine glass tipped. She didn't hear it break.
They were already in the room. That was the part her brain kept refusing, they were already in it, four of them, five, positioned the way furniture is positioned, men in dark suits standing in her twelfth-floor apartment with its river view and its doorman who remembered names, and not one of them was looking at her like she was a person. They were looking at her like a task.
Too late, she understood the saying had never been a saying. It was a schedule.
The front door opened.
The men bowed.
And walking in came Valerio Le Sabre, with Aislinn beside him, phone still in her hand.
Warm as ever, on that phone, thirty seconds ago. Warm like eleven years hadn't passed. And she'd been standing in the hallway the entire time.
Something in Stephanie snapped clean through.
She went for her, no plan in it, nothing but eleven years of it finally off the leash, and got exactly one step before Valerio tipped his chin, the smallest nod in the world, and hands closed on her arms from both sides and hauled her clean off her feet.
"Why?" It tore out of her, ugly, at the woman standing there in her decent coat with her stricken face. "Why do you always have it so easy?"
Aislinn looked at her, and there was no triumph anywhere in it, which was the worst thing, the very worst thing, she'd come to watch Stephanie end and she'd brought sorrow to it.
"You know I never did?"
"I hate you." It came up her throat like blood. "I fucking hate you!"
Valerio tilted his head toward Aislinn, and when he spoke it was to her alone, in the tone of a man explaining gravity.
"You never complain like they do. That's what kills them—"
Stephanie started to laugh.
It came out of her from somewhere low and broken and it kept coming, rising, because she'd just seen it, the whole shape of it, the one card she was still holding in a room full of guns.
"I get it now." She was laughing so hard the men had to hold her up. "You still don't know. You still don't know, and that's why you're helping the bitch."
Valerio didn't ask. He simply looked at his men, done, bored, final.
"Get rid of her." Two words in Italian first, quiet and absolute, and only then the English, as though the sentence needed saying twice to be real.
The hands tightened. Her feet left their positions on her beautiful floor, and Stephanie kept laughing, high and wrong, laughing the way you laugh when the house is already on fire so why not, and she threw it at them as they dragged her, threw it across the whole lovely apartment her silence had bought.
"Her brother is Viktor Biancardi! He was hiding her from you!"
The room stopped.
"I don't have a brother," Aislinn said.
"Your brother killed his father!"