Vengeful Vows
Prologue
brOOKLYN
“We’re so getting laid tonight.”
Harley announces it to the entire boutique the way other girls announce they got into their first-choice school, chin lifted, certain, daring the universe to argue with her. The woman folding cashmere by the window glances over. I don’t bother to lower my voice.
“Speak for yourself.”
“I’m always speaking for myself. You’re the one who needs the pep talk.” She holds a sliver of black silk against her body and scowls at the mirror like it personally insulted her. “It’s New Year’s, Brooklyn. New year, new us.”
“New us did old us a favor last year and stayed home.”
“Old us was seventeen and a coward.”
“This old us turned eighteen three weeks ago and is still a coward,” I say, and she laughs, because it’s true, and because between the two of us, honesty has always been the cheapest thing we own.
We met eight years ago, the week Harley transferred in during fifth grade.
She was the new kid with wrong shoes and a mouth that wrote checks her tiny body couldn’t cash.
I watched three girls back her into the lockers during gym class and decided I liked her before she ever said a word to me.
I put one of them on the floor. Harley’s been my bestie ever since. My only friend really.
When your last name makes grown men go quiet at the dinner table, you learn fast which kids want to know you and which ones want to know what you can do for them. Harley never wanted anything but a ride home and someone to split a soft pretzel with at the mall.
That’s the part nobody warns you about, being who I am. It isn’t the security detail, or the way a room rearranges itself around my father when he walks into it. It’s the loneliness of being wanted for the wrong reasons, by people who smile at you and add you up at the same time.
So no. I’m not getting laid tonight.
Nobody at that party is going to do more than say three forgettable words to me and then drift back to the safety of someone whose father doesn’t end careers, or whose family doesn’t end lives. It isn’t modesty. I’m not saving myself for the right guy.
My mom would only want me to be safe with my body and my head.
She worries too often that the people who get close to me are doing it with a calculator running behind their eyes.
My dad is a different beast. He would lose his entire mind, but that’s because he’s my dad who still sees me as eight and who still checks the locks on my windows despite the fact that someone would have to be braindead to break into a home where killers sleep.
It’s not that I don’t want it—sex. I want it so bad that some nights it’s a physical thing, a low ache that has nothing to do with any actual boy and everything to do with wanting to be touched like I’m a person and not a name.
I just haven’t met a single soul brave enough, or interesting enough, to hand a piece of myself over to.
“This one,” Harley says, and shoves a hanger at me.
It’s red. The deep, unapologetic kind, the color of something that wants to be looked at.
I take it without thinking, and that’s the problem. I’m already running my thumb down the silk before my brain catches up and reminds me why I don’t do red.
Red is my mother’s color. Her signature color, the color that makes a statement when she enters a room. It’s the color she was wearing when I made a bet with a stranger at five that she couldn’t beat my dad in the ring. Mom dropped him on his ass, embarrassingly quick.
I wore red exactly once, to a christening when I was thirteen, and for a month afterward everyone I know called me mini Sienna and marveled at how I’m the spitting image of a woman whose blood I don’t carry a single drop of. I don’t particularly care for the reminder that I’m not actually hers.
I haven’t worn anything bolder than burgundy since.
“Put it back,” I tell Harley. “You know I don’t—”
My phone buzzes from the back pocket of my jeans.
I almost ignore it. Then I eye the number, or the lack of one. No name. No saved contact. Just a bubble that has no business knowing my number at all.
UNKNOWN
Get the red one.
I read it twice. The dress is still in my hand. I look up, and the store is exactly what it was a second ago. Harley is elbow-deep in a sale rack, two girls giggling by the shoes, the cashmere woman still by the window, and the wet dark blue of New York City is pressing against the glass.
Nothing is out of place. Nobody is looking at me.
ME
Who is this?
The three dots appear instantly, like whoever this is was already typing. Like someone has been waiting.
UNKNOWN
Someone who wants to see you in the red dress.
A laugh punches out of me, the nervous kind, the kind that doesn’t mean anything’s funny.
ME
That someone sounds like a creep.
And if you’re stupid enough to think I’ll wear something a stranger picked out, you really don’t know who my family is.
The reply takes longer this time. Long enough that I’ve started to convince myself it’s a wrong number, a bored idiot, a stupid prank, a glitch—
UNKNOWN
I know exactly who your family is, Brooklyn.
The floor doesn’t move. It just stops being something I can feel. The hairs on the back of my neck stand.
UNKNOWN
That’s not why I’m watching.
I turn a slow circle in the middle of the store, phone gripped so tight the case bites my palm.
Faces. So many faces, and not one of them aimed at me, which is somehow worse, because it means he’s better at this than I am.
It means he’s already learned the trick I’ve spent my whole life perfecting—how to be in a room and not be seen.
“Brooklyn?” Harley’s voice, far away. “You good?”
I’m not. My heart is going like I’ve been on the mats for three rounds, and underneath the fear, there’s something else. Something warm and stupid and brand-new, uncurling low in my stomach where it has absolutely no right to be.
The phone buzzes one last time.
UNKNOWN
Get the red one. I won’t ask twice.
I should screenshot it. I should call my father, or Dom, or any one of the six men paid to keep exactly this from happening to me.
Instead I stand there a long, quiet moment with a stranger’s want in one hand and a red dress in the other.
And then, because I have always been my own worst enemy, because my uncle Giovanni swears my stubbornness will get me bitten on the ass one day and leave a scar I’ll carry the rest of my life, I walk to the register.
I buy the red one.