Chapter 1
CASSIA
My mother’s sobs wake me before the sun does.
My body registers the sound before my feet touch the floor. Before the humid July air presses against my skin. Before I count the seconds between her ragged breaths.
Three seconds apart. Getting worse.
Elena is gone.
I sit on the edge of my bed and listen to the house fall apart.
Papa’s footsteps pound the hallway. Back and forth. Back and forth. The rhythm of a man watching everything he built turn to ash. Fourteen steps. Pause. Fourteen steps back. Twenty-three minutes of pacing. I’ve counted.
The wedding was two days ago. Three generations of Neri survival, shattered because my sister couldn’t walk down an aisle she’d been groomed for since she was twelve.
My hand goes flat against my chest.
Five beats. Still here.
The hallway smells like cold coffee and my mother’s perfume when I slip out of my room.
Something floral and expensive. Elena bought it for her last Christmas.
I gave her a gift card to The Container Store.
For the pantry she’d been meaning to reorganize.
Mama thanked me. Used Elena’s perfume. The pantry still looks the same.
That’s how it’s always been. Elena gives the beautiful things. I give the functional ones. And functional things don’t get displayed on the dresser.
Papa stands in the living room with his back to me, phone pressed to his ear, shoulders hunched like he’s bracing for a blow. Gray hair that wasn’t gray five years ago. His hand trembles against the phone case.
The collar of his shirt is crooked, buttons misaligned, and Mama didn’t fix it for him. She always fixes it for him. Has for thirty years.
Not today.
He doesn’t notice me standing there. Nobody ever does.
“Three generations,” he says, and his voice cracks on the word. “Three generations of service, and this is how it ends. My daughter made fools of us all.”
My daughter. There’s only ever one face in his mind when he says that.
I got my first calculator when I was eight. Elena got etiquette lessons twice a week and dresses for family events. I got sensible clothes that wouldn’t show stains and Cassia, have you finished the quarterly reconciliation?
I finished it. I always finish it. I’ve been finding their errors, covering their gaps, holding the quiet parts of this family together since I was sixteen years old.
If I’m invisible, I’m safe. If I’m useful, I survive.
That’s the math, anyway. The equation I’ve balanced my whole life.
Papa’s voice rises. “I don’t know where she went. I don’t know why. She left a note. Said she couldn’t do it, couldn’t be trapped.”
His voice catches. Breaks. A sound I’ve never heard from him before, thin and splintering, like a man who just ran out of people to call.
Because he knows what I know. What anyone who’s spent time in that compound knows.
Dante Santoro doesn’t forget. He maintains ledgers in his head the way I maintain them on paper, and every debt gets paid. One way or another.
I step back from the doorway before Papa turns.
Down the hall, Mama has gone quiet behind the master bedroom door.
Neither of them has come to check on me. Neither of them has thought to wonder what the other daughter might do.
I could stay. Let Papa grovel his way through negotiations that will fail. Watch him offer money we don’t have, promises he can’t keep. Dante will listen with that stone face, calculating the insult, and then he’ll make an example of us.
Because Elena didn’t just break a contract. She humiliated him. Made him look like a man whose bride would rather vanish than share his bed.
That kind of wound demands repayment.
Or I could go. Offer him something Papa can’t. Something that might matter to a man who just lost his political alliance and gained a public humiliation.
Me.
It’s not a good choice. But it’s the only one I have.
The burgundy dress hangs in my closet. Elena’s bridesmaid dress.
The one I was supposed to wear while I watched my sister marry a man whose voice I’ve memorized from the nights I ran numbers at the Santoro compound.
Whose nightmares I’ve heard through the walls.
Whose hands tremble when he pours whiskey at 3:00 a.m. and thinks no one is watching.
He doesn’t know anyone sees that.
I see. I always see. That’s the thing about being invisible. You learn everything about everyone, and no one learns a single thing about you.
I pull the dress from its hanger. The fabric is heavier than I expect. Lined, structured, the kind of quality that costs more than my monthly car payment. The color of wine stains on a white tablecloth.
Elena complained it washed her out. She wanted blush pink, anything delicate. But Giada Santoro chose the color. And what Giada wants, she gets.
I strip off my sleep shirt and stand before the mirror.
Soft hips, full breasts, a body I spent years trying to minimize because taking up space wasn’t part of the equation for girls like me. I used to slouch. Cross my arms. Wear loose things that hid the shape of me, as if being smaller would make me easier to keep.
Today I need a man to look at me. And I need him to see something worth keeping.
I step into the dress and pull it up over my hips. The zipper catches for a moment, teeth biting into the fabric, before sliding home with a sound like a lock turning. The lining is cool against my skin. Smooth. Close.
The reflection in the mirror stops me.
Deep red hugging every curve I’ve tried to hide. Clinging at the waist, flaring over my hips. Dark hair falling past my shoulders, still mussed from sleep. Brown eyes that have spent three years memorizing a man who’s never once looked in my direction.
I run my fingers through my hair, smoothing it. My reflection does the same.
This woman in her sister’s dress, with her shoulders squared instead of hunched. She looks like someone who walks into rooms and stays. Someone who makes choices instead of accepting whatever’s left over after everyone else has chosen first.
I don’t know if I am that woman.
But I’m going to walk into that compound like I am, and figure out the rest later.
I find my shoes. Simple black heels. My fingers tremble as I clasp my mother’s old pearl earrings.
Small, worth next to nothing, but they were hers before she became a Neri.
Before she had daughters. She cried when Elena was promised to the Santoros.
Wept for the daughter who would be trapped in the mafia world forever.
She never cried for me.
She would if she knew where you were going. She would if she thought to ask.
I walk to my bedroom door. On the other side, Papa’s voice still rumbles from the living room. Damage control. Desperate negotiations with men who hold our family’s fate in scarred hands.
I could tell him. Walk out there and watch his face cycle through shock, disbelief, refusal. He would say I’m not the right daughter. Not the one who was prepared for this.
So I don’t ask permission. I don’t explain. I just leave.
The front door clicks shut behind me and the morning air hits my skin. Humid, heavy, too hot for July even though the sun is up. Ninety-two percent humidity at six in the morning. The air doesn’t move. It sits on your skin and stays.
Sweat prickles along my spine before I’ve taken three steps.
My Honda sits in the driveway. Sensible. Paid off. Like me.
I slide into the driver’s seat. The leather is already warm against my bare thighs, the dress riding up as I settle behind the wheel.
Engine turns over on the first try. I pull out before I can change my mind, before the front door opens and Papa comes running out with his face white and his mouth full of you can’t, you’re not, she was the one who.
The streets are quiet this early. A garbage truck rumbles somewhere in the distance.
Mockingbirds argue in the live oaks that line the road, their calls sharp against the heavy air.
Jasmine drifts through my cracked window, mixing with the sweet rot underneath that never leaves this city, no matter how much the tourists pretend it isn’t there.
I love this city. Every humid, beautiful, decaying inch of it. New Orleans is in my bones the way numbers are in my head, and leaving has never been an option.
You left once.
The acceptance letter from Chicago. A forensic accounting firm that decided I was worth something. I kept it hidden for two weeks, reading we are pleased to offer until the words stopped looking like a mistake.
I didn’t take it. Told myself Papa needed me.
Scared to find out what happens when you stop being needed and start being wanted.
The blocks slide past. Four. Seven. Nine. The neighborhood changes as I move deeper into Garden District territory. Bigger houses. Higher walls. Security cameras mounted at every corner, watching, recording, remembering.
Like him. He remembers everything. Names, debts, slights.
I’ve seen it. Three years of late nights in that compound, cross-referencing transactions and tracing money through shell corporations while he worked in the next room.
I learned his tells through doorways and shadows the way I learn everything. From the margins.
The rolled sleeves that mean he’s either about to work or about to hurt someone. The stillness that settles over him before violence, so complete it thickens the air. The way his teeth grind when someone disappoints him.
Twelve. Thirteen.
One night, I heard him scream.
A nightmare. Raw and broken, echoing through the walls at 2:00 a.m. I was working late, Papa asleep in the car, and I heard it.
Heard him stumble to the study. Heard the clink of glass.
I stood in the hallway, pressed against the wall, my breath held so tight my lungs ached, and watched through a crack in the door as he poured whiskey with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking.
He pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes. Breathed through something that looked like drowning.
I should have gone back to the ledgers and pretended I hadn’t seen the most dangerous man in New Orleans fall apart in the dark.
I stayed. Watched. My hand pressed flat against the wall where his shoulder would have been on the other side.
The compound gates appear ahead. Black iron covered in climbing jasmine, tall enough to block the view. Pretty, if you don’t know what it hides.
I pull up to the guard station and kill the engine. The air conditioning dies with a wheeze, and heat floods back into the car. My palms are damp. I wipe them on my thighs, leaving faint streaks on the burgundy fabric.
The guard steps out of the booth. Young, armed, his hand resting on his holster as he approaches. He looks at my car the way people look at something that doesn’t belong.
I’ve driven through these gates a hundred times. Always with Papa. Always the accountant’s quiet daughter, not worth a second glance.
My knuckles go white against the steering wheel.
The guard reaches my window. I roll it down. Hot air floods the car, thick with jasmine and the metallic smell of the iron gate.
“Miss Neri.” He frowns, looking past me to the empty passenger seat. “Your father isn’t with you.”
“No.” My voice holds steady. I’m surprised by that. “I’m here alone. I need to see Don Santoro.”
The guard’s eyes drop to my dress. The deep red. The way it fits. His gaze flickers, then goes blank.
“It’s six in the morning.”
“I know what time it is.”
A pause. He studies me like a lock he doesn’t have the key for.
“Wait here.”
He walks back to the booth. Picks up a phone. His eyes stay on me the whole time.
I sit in my paid-off Honda in my sister’s bridesmaid dress, waiting for permission to enter a world I’ve watched from the outside since I was twenty-one.
My pulse kicks against my throat.
Papa doesn’t know I’m gone. Mama is still behind her bedroom door. Elena is wherever people go when they choose themselves over everyone who needed them.
And I’m here. Sitting at the gates. About to offer myself to a man who has never once looked at me.