Chapter 3
Pierce
On the courthouse steps, the wind gnaws the last warmth from my face, just as the city’s gray light sinks behind the granite towers.
The world is sutured together by the squawk of police radios and a bus hiss, all outrage and exhaustion.
I’ve won today. I’ve survived another hearing, another judge’s migraine, another client whose face will haunt me in the cold hours before dawn.
But today — tonight — the only verdict I care for is waiting uptown, curled into sheets of borrowed linen and laughter. Laura: still mine, for now.
I replay her voice as a refuge from the hours of testimony.
How she’d whispered to me this morning, half-mocking, “Don’t let them eat you alive.
” And then the thumbprint of her mouth on my collarbone, a promise in red.
My body aches for her, blood a current dragging me north through traffic and crowds, past the lies that paved our old world.
Nothing else matters. Not the past, not what’s coming.
Just her. The wolf-girl, grown colder and more beautiful by the year, but with that animal softness she reserved for me alone.
So I move fast, shouldering through the crowd, already hearing my own keys in Laura’s lock, already tasting the cheap Chianti she would have waiting, already undressing her in the ruined parlor of my imagination.
That’s why I miss the first shadow tailing me — a flick of darkness, too deliberate, in the avenue’s glass.
My phone buzzes: three missed calls from a Midtown number I don’t recognize. I thumb it silent, teeth clenched.
My path takes me down fifty-second, where the lights are more strangers than friends, and the city’s arteries run slick with the day’s failures. My gait is longer now, my heartbeat a metronome. I cross at the light and that’s when the world capsizes.
A hand, gloved, slides around my throat, pinning the words in my mouth.
A second hand jerks my left arm, wrenching my shoulder so hard I see nothing but static.
Three men in black, faces a negative exposure: all absence, no identity.
Their hands are trained, not just strong but confident, the choreography of men who have taken other men before me.
I try to shout but my jaw is pushed sideways, cheek mashed against the icy hood of a waiting car.
They open the back door and fold me inside, every movement practiced, every pain point mapped and charted. I taste bile, hot metal. The world blurs.
Then, in the dim wash of the dome light, I see the impossible: Dominic Stasio.
He sits driver-side rear, so close I could reach out and claw his face bloody, but I know better than to try. Dominic is older now, jowls slackening, hair like river ice, but his eyes are still the color of premeditated murder. He watches me the way some men watch fights — hoping for a kill.
“Hello, Mr. Landon,” he croons, voice dipped in something smooth and ancient. “You look well. Law is treating you kindly?”
Beside him, the men in black do not move, do not breathe.
Dominic’s cologne is all over the car, a smell I want to scrub from history, but can’t; it triggers something sick and childlike in my backbone.
The engine hums, interior lights off now, city rolling by outside in moiré strips of yellow and gray.
The windows are blacked out. We are somewhere between Hell’s Kitchen and oblivion.
“I assume you know why I’m here,” Dominic says.
“I assume you’re going to tell me anyway.”
He clucks his tongue. “Laura was always right. You’re stubborn.” A thin smile. “That’s why I liked you. At first.”
I find my voice, a thread of glass in my throat: “If you touch her—”
He holds up a hand, wedding band dull with scratches. “No. I won’t touch my daughter. I know what she’s capable of. I know how she would retaliate.” He leans closer, his calm enormous. “But you are a different story. Your love for her is a liability. A flaw.”
I try to kick out, but a meat-paw claps my shin so hard I nearly faint. The pain brings clarity. I taste Laura’s name, but don’t say it.
Dominic sighs. “I did not come to debate you, Mr. Landon. I came to clarify. Laura belongs to this family. Her blood, her destiny, everything. You are a passing fascination — nothing more. Sicilian daughters do not take husbands from the outside. You are not in the story.”
He lets that hang. The car’s lights stab forward in brief, haunted pulses. I see my own reflection in the rear window: a man who thought he’d left this shit behind.
“She’ll come looking,” I say, hating the crack in my voice.
Dominic examines his cufflinks, little gold hammers. “She won’t. She was going to tell you tonight, actually. That’s why we did this now, before you could embarrass both of you.” He waves a hand; the gesture is kingly, cruel.
“You’re lying,” I snarl, but the certainty doesn’t hold.
Dominic’s face is patient — the mask of a surgeon setting in for a long, satisfying operation.
“It doesn’t matter what you think, Pierce.
You’re done. We can do this the easy way, or the tragic way.
” He leans in so close I smell his breath, mint and violence.
“Your brother, Adam, is being watched. Your grandparents. If you try to contact Laura again, if you try to come home, they are dead by morning. You understand this?”
Everything in me goes white-hot, then icy. I have never hated a man so purely. But my words fail me. My hands are useless.
Dominic takes my phone, wallet, keys, passes them to the silent man in front.
“Tomorrow morning, you’re on a private jet to London.
New identity waiting. Decent money. We’ll check from time to time to make sure you’re being obedient.
If you so much as call the wrong area code, we start with Adam, then old Mr. Landon, then the wife. Is that enough warning?”
I stare at my hands. They are the hands of a boy, after all, not a killer. Not a hero.
“Why,” I say, the word a whimper, a prayer.
Dominic softens, just barely. “Because you'll never be family, Pierce. And because my daughter deserves to rule, not ruin. You would have ruined her.” He almost sounds sad. “I know love. I killed the only woman I ever loved, to keep her safe. Sometimes that’s the job.”
The car slows. The doors open.
Two men drag me into the night, across a tarmac wound with blue taxiway lights.
The cold hits in a blast. The jet looms ahead, its belly open, crew waiting.
No other humans in sight. They walk me up the steps.
A woman in a British Airways uniform hands me a passport.
"Welcome aboard, Mr. Campbell," she says, a practiced smile that means nothing.
Behind me, Dominic watches. He holds up a hand, two fingers together, and the men fall back.
“Bon voyage,” he says, and I want to scream, but I don’t.
They close the door. The lock clicks — metallic, final, absolute.
And then I’m hurtling into the black, towards nothing, towards exile, toward the end of every lie I’ve ever told myself about freedom.