The Don's Wife Wore My Face

Halfway through the family's celebration dinner, the big screen started looping a video nobody was meant to see.

A man and a woman half undressed on the bed. She kept her face turned from the camera.

He didn't — it was Kai Voss, the Don's most trusted capo, caught clean on film.

The ballroom went silent. At the head table, the Don's face turned to stone.

Her face stayed turned away the whole time. It didn't matter. The jaw, the hair, the way she moved — it was Liora Marrick. The Don's wife.

My sister.

A capo who touches his boss's wife doesn't lose his rank. He gets taken downstairs and never comes back.

Kai's eyes locked onto mine, begging and threatening at once.

I'd given him what he wanted once before. I'd stood up in this room and said the woman was me — because I loved him, and because Liora and I shared seven parts of the same face.

That lie bought me a wedding, a cellar, and a back-room table where Kai's rush to heal my sister cost me the ability to ever have children.

I died screaming.

Now I was back, and the screen was still looping.

Then I lifted a hand to my mouth.

"Oh. That woman in the video. Doesn't she look a lot like Liora?"

...

The pain was still there when I opened my eyes — that ripped-open, hollow ache below my ribs, the memory of a body that had been emptied out on a table.

Then the chandeliers came into focus. A hundred thousand dollars of black silk and diamonds packed into the Ravenmoor ballroom.

The same room. The same night.

On the screen, a woman was tangled up with Kai Voss, both of them stripped to the waist and gripping each other like the room was on fire.

The music cut. Nobody in that room so much as shifted a glass.

At the head table, the Don stared at the screen and his face went from stone to something worse.

The family's law on this was not written down anywhere, and everybody knew it by heart.

A capo who laid hands on a boss's wife had broken the oldest rule in the house. Not suspension. Not disgrace. He was taken downstairs and he did not come back up the same man, if he came up at all.

And in the meantime the shame would soak into every Marrick who shared the name — into my father, into me.

Kai stood ten feet away with his shirt glued to his back.

I knew what he was going to do, because he had already done it once.

Last time, I stood up. Partly for the family. Mostly because I had loved him since I was fifteen and I thought this was the one door that would open.

I said the woman was me.

Liora and I were cut from the same cloth, close enough that no one in that hall had reason to argue.

The Don, wanting the night to end clean, married me off to Kai before the plates were cleared.

I thought I had saved everyone. I thought he'd be grateful.

Instead Kai put me in the cellar of his house and left me there with the damp and the roaches and the staff, who took their cues from him and took them gladly.

He told me I was a schemer who'd trapped him, that I'd ruined the one thing he'd sworn to keep clean for Liora.

Then Liora got pregnant and lost it, and the family's private physician said she needed something to rebuild her strength. Some rare thing, some cure.

Kai opened me up himself and took my womb out to make it.

I bled out on that table, screaming, and no one in that house thought it was worth stopping. The last thing I heard was the men dragging the plastic around me, talking over my body like a piece of furniture.

"Liora gave the order. She always said the younger one was there to be used."

A stepping stone. That's all I'd ever been — something in their love story to be walked across and left behind in the mud.

I came back to myself in that ballroom, and my sister was watching me.

Liora sat beside the Don in pearls, her chin up, and her beautiful, cold eyes slid to me with the same command she'd given me my whole life.

Fix this. You know how.

Kai's eyes found me too. Desperate. Begging. And underneath it, the old threat.

They wanted me to do it again.

Why? Why, when I was the one who had died twice for their convenience?

I dropped my gaze so neither of them could read what was behind it. Then I lifted my hand and covered my mouth, the way a girl does when she's just been startled.

"Oh," I said.

Not loud. In a room like that, it carried like a dropped tray.

"That woman on the screen. Doesn't she look like Liora?"

The silence broke into a hundred whispers at once. Every head in the hall swung off me and onto my sister, whose face went white so fast I thought she might slide out of her chair.

The Don's eyes moved. Screen. Wife. Screen. Wife. He had the patience of a man who had buried better liars than her.

"It does look like her," he said. He didn't raise his voice, and somehow that was worse.

Liora's lips parted. Whatever she was about to say, the Don's hand flat on the table stopped it.

Kai got there first. He stepped forward with both palms out, his voice cracking in exactly the right place.

"Sir — Flora and I have been together since spring. We kept it quiet out of respect for her father. That's Flora in the video. The two of them are sisters, they've got the same face. Anyone could mistake it. That's on me. I should have said something before tonight."

His eyes were wet. His jaw was tight. He was very, very good.

The Don turned his head and looked at me, and I felt it land on my skin like a hand closing around my throat.

"If that's you in the video," he said, "then explain something to me, girl. Why did you just say it looked like your sister?"