Chapter 2

Cecilia's POV

The silence pressing in from both sides of that empty stretch was the kind that made it hard to breathe.

"Well, look at this."

The taller one tilted his head, his gaze dragging down the length of me in one slow, contemptuous pass, like he was appraising something not worth the trouble of picking up.

"Ugly little thing, isn't she?" The other one's laugh came down easy and weightless, soaked through with malice. "God, she really is. Hey, sweetheart—what happened to your face? Fall into a dumpster on the way out?"

I kept my mouth shut.

My fingertips had already found their way into my coat pocket, clamped around the fold of emergency cash I had kept there on purpose.

The stiff edges of the bills bit into my palm.

I kept my head down and raised the money to chest height without looking up.

"Take it. That's everything I have on me."

He snatched the bills out of my hand and fixed his eyes on my face, his fingers working through the stack in quick, practiced flicks.

"Sixty dollars?" His tone dropped like a temperature. "You think sixty dollars is worth our time out here?"

"That's all I've got." My throat had gone dry and tight, my voice barely clearing the wind. "I'm just a waitress. That's genuinely everything."

"A waitress."

He stepped forward. The smell hit me first—stale liquor, dense and sour—and I held my breath without thinking, every muscle along my back pulling taut at once.

"You want to go home tonight, you take off the coat. All of it. Let the cold sort you out. Call it a toll."

"You're not serious." The words were already out before I could pull them back.

The blade came up the next second. Slow, steady, unhurried—and stopped one inch from my sternum. The cold radiated off the steel through the fabric of my coat, sharp enough to raise the skin underneath.

"The coat." His voice was flat and left no room for anything else. "Now."

My fingers found the zipper pull and went stiff around it. Something deep and bone-cold told me with perfect clarity that the coat was never what they were actually after.

The mouth of the alley was empty. The street beyond it was dead quiet. In this city, at this hour, no one was coming.

I set my jaw and applied the faintest pressure to the zipper. It gave one notch.

—Bang.

The shot tore through the dark without warning. Not a kill round—a warning.

The sound hit my eardrums like a fist, and the ringing flooded in and filled everything.

Growing up under Dante's roof, I had learned to tell one gunshot from another.

Sharp, controlled fire, not the cheap, deafening bang of a street thug's gun.

The two hooded men every muscle in their bodies went rigid.

I twisted my head slowly.

Four figures stood at the mouth of the alley, roughly thirty feet away.

Three of them held a loose, practiced formation around the fourth, weight balanced, hands loose at their hips, eyes sweeping the empty street in slow, calculated passes, like they were checking whether anything else on this block was still breathing.

Not petty street criminals.

My gaze finally landed on the man at the center, because he was the one you could not look away from.

Tall, broad-shouldered, wrapped in a knee-length dark overcoat.

No hat, no scarf, as if the cold held no jurisdiction over him.

Snow had settled lightly across his shoulders and he had not bothered to brush it off.

His dark hair was cropped short on the sides, and the faint glow from the distant streetlamp sculpted every line of his features into sharp, breathtaking relief.

He was devastatingly handsome, the kind of striking good looks that stole your breath for a split second. But underneath that brutal beauty simmered unmistakable danger. Men who looked like him, out in a place like this after dark, were never anything close to safe.

He said something low to the man on his left, his voice unhurried and flat.

"La sentenza è stata eseguita."

I knew what that meant.

The sentence has been carried out.

The cold, formal phrasing that turned a killing into a procedure, a verdict into a body.

My eyes dropped to the pavement without meaning to.

A dark stain spread across the snow-dusted concrete,is blood.

It led toward the mouth of the alley, where the shadows swallowed most of what lay beyond.

At the very edge of the darkness, just where the light gave out, I could make out the shape of two feet.

Nobody slept on pavement in a blizzard. Nobody who was still alive, anyway.

My foot moved back one step before I had made any conscious decision to move it.

The man at the center's eyes found me.

I pulled my eyes away fast.

A beat of silence, then I heard his voice again behind me, low and unhurried, resuming whatever conversation I had interrupted.

My pulse was going loud and hard behind my ears.

The thug with the knife was still standing inches from me.

I could hear him breathing too fast.

I tilted my head just slightly in his direction and dropped my voice to something.

"Don't look at them. Don't move fast."

His voice cracked. "What?"

"Made men," I breathed. "This is a sit-down. Family business. You understand what that means."

I watched his throat move as he swallowed.

"They kill people for being in the wrong place," I said. "They don't care that we were here first. So what you're going to do right now is put that knife away, and you and your friend are going to walk, not run, in the opposite direction, and you're going to forget this street exists."

The knife disappeared inside his jacket before I finished the sentence.

Both of them backed away in small, careful steps, then turned and walked—not ran—until the dark swallowed them whole.

I watched them go.

No shot followed. No voice cut the silence.

The four men at the mouth of the alley let them leave without so much as a shifted weight or a turned head.

Good. That told me something.

If two witnesses could walk away untouched, then so could one girl on a scooter who had seen nothing, heard nothing, and had absolutely no reason to still be standing here.

So I swung my scooter around.

The second shot hit the pavement six inches to my left.

The echo spread out across the empty road and dissolved into the snowfall, and then there was nothing but the low hum of the city somewhere far off and my own heartbeat, which had relocated itself to the base of my throat.

I did not move. I did not look down at the fresh gouge in the pavement beside my foot.

From behind me, his voice cut through the quiet, unhurried and low.

"Bring her to me."

Two of the men peeled away and started toward me, their footsteps steady and unhurried against the snow-packed pavement.

I tracked them closing in, cold dread coiling tight in my chest.