Chapter 2

10:00 p.m. The second floor of the house.

I tuck the covers around a sleeping Lily.

Her tiny hands grip the sheets tight. Her face, still pale from the freezing wind this morning, hasn't regained any color. I sit on the edge of the bed and brush my fingers across my daughter's forehead. My chest physically aches, a dull pain that makes it hard to breathe.

My phone vibrates in my pocket. Dante's name lights up the screen.

I step out into the hallway and answer it.

"There's a shootout in the East End." Dante's voice comes through, backed by a deliberately manufactured layer of background noise. "Chloe's nephew caught a stray bullet from a rival crew. It's bad. I gotta stay at the hospital tonight, keep an eye on things and clean up this mess. Don't wait up."

Another lie.

I lean back against the cold wall and close my eyes.

This morning, he threw his own flesh and blood out onto the street for that boy. Now he uses the exact same excuse to stay out all night. There was a time when this man would take a knife to the gut on the street and still drag himself back to our leaky basement apartment, clutching his bleeding wound, just so I wouldn't be left alone and scared.

Now, even his lies are lazily, brutally cruel.

I open my mouth, but my throat feels bitter and numb. "Suit yourself." I force the words out in a hoarse whisper and hang up.

Not even two seconds later, the screen lights up again. A string of picture messages from an unknown number.

I open them. It's Chloe.

The first is a screenshot of a wire transfer. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars, moved straight from Dante's private account to Chloe Vance.

The second is a selfie. Under the dim lights of a club, she leans against Dante's chest, wearing the limited-edition black diamond necklace he just bought. In the picture, Dante's scarred hand rests possessively on her waist.

I stare dead at that scar. He got that back in the slums. Some street thugs robbed me of our grocery money, and he fought them to get it back. I remember shaking and crying while I bandaged him up, but he just smiled, kissed my forehead, and told me I was his whole life.

Now, that same hand is wrapped around another woman.

A snarky text follows the pictures: "Dante says you can't even name a single jewelry brand from the new season. Some women are just born to scrub dishes in the kitchen. Have fun growing old in that big empty house, you boring housewife. He's mine tonight."

I take a deep breath and roughly wipe my tears away with the back of my hand. I block the number.

Two minutes later, I head downstairs.

The syndicate radio sitting in the corner of the living room suddenly crackles with harsh static. It's the open frequency Dante uses to bark orders at his street-level guys.

Dante's furious roar booms through the empty room.

"Serena! Are you out of your fucking mind? Who the hell gave you the right to block her?!"

I stop dead in my tracks and stare at the machine blinking with a red light. Hundreds of guys across the South Side monitor this channel.

"I'm using Chloe to secure key connections in the East End! This is about the future of our entire crew! You jealous, ignorant, pathetic housewife! You almost ruined my entire operation! Know your fucking place!"

Dead silence falls over the radio. Nobody dares to breathe a word.

I stand frozen as the blood in my veins turns to ice. He just stripped me of my last shred of dignity as his wife in front of the entire criminal underworld. For a cheap mob groupie, he took my pride, dragged it through the mud, and ripped it to pieces.

I march over and rip the power cord straight out of the wall.

I head to the storage closet and drag out a dusty cardboard box from the very bottom. It holds everything we brought with us when we finally moved out of the slums. I dump the contents onto the carpet.

A cheap, plain iron band rolls out from a pile of old, faded bills.

I crouch down and pick it up.

Seven years ago, a broke Dante hammered this ring out of scrap metal at an auto shop. He got down on one knee on our flooded apartment floor and swore he would never let me shed a single tear of pain.

Half the gun-running routes and syndicate resources in North America answer to me. With a single nod, I can mobilize hundreds of top-tier enforcers. Yet I willingly hid the Romano family's fangs, playing the part of a meek, ordinary wife. I ate dirt with him and watched him climb his way up to where he is today.

I thought I was loving a man. Turns out, I was just feeding a greedy, painfully insecure parasite.

I stand up, walk over to the bar, and pull out a bottle of the strongest whiskey we have. I pour a glass and dangle that cheap metal ring right over the rim.

Clink.

The ring sinks to the bottom.

I strike a match. With a steady flick of my wrist, I drop it into the glass. A blue flame flares up instantly, greedily devouring the one token that represented our past.

Right then, my phone starts buzzing like crazy on the couch.

I walk over and put it on speaker.

"Chloe is gone!" Dante's voice cracks with raw panic. The loud roar of a revving car engine blasts in the background. "Her and the kid, they practically vanished from the safehouse! Four armed guards, all of them got their legs snapped and tossed in an alley!"

He pants heavily into the receiver. "Is this you?! Did you take my money and hire some gutter-trash street gang?! You crazy bitch!"

I stand by the coffee table, watching the blue flames dance in the glass. I don't say a word.

My silence pushes him over the edge.

"You think pulling some cheap street stunt is gonna win me back? Keep dreaming!" Dante's voice is shrill, grating against the silence of the empty living room. "Take a good look at yourself, Serena! You're a boring, miserable housewife. I can't even take you out in public without feeling embarrassed! What the hell do you even have, besides this house that I let you live in?"

At the bottom of the glass, the cheap metal ring has already burned into a charred, blackened piece of trash.

"Listen to me! If a single hair on Chloe's head is touched, it's on you!" Dante roars viciously. "I'll cut off all your credit cards! I'll pull every dime of support for you and Lily! I'll leave you with absolutely nothing and send you crawling back to the slums to beg on the streets! Know your place, you worthless bitch. You're nothing without me!"

He slams the phone down. The dial tone echoes through the dead silence of the room.