Chapter 1 - THE GIRL IN THE ALLEY|
I had eight hundred and sixty-three dollars, a lump I couldn't afford to have examined, and a jacket I bought at a thrift store for five dollars. I gave that jacket to a dying girl in an alley because she was shivering and I could not walk away. I didn't know she was the daughter of the most dangerous man on the East Coast. I didn't know that calling the number on her phone would start a war inside his own house — or that someone there had already killed her mother.
Elena Hartwell stepped out the back door of Rosy's Diner at 11:43 on a Tuesday night in October with eleven dollars in her apron and a five-hour shift ahead of her that she would start again in six hours.
Her feet had stopped hurting hours ago, which was worse than the pain. She had lined the soles of her only shoes with cardboard cut from a cereal box, and the cardboard had gone soft and useless somewhere around nine o'clock. Every step now felt like walking on wet newspaper.
The tips had been eleven dollars. A drunk had thrown a cup of coffee at her because his eggs were cold, and Rick, the manager, had deducted the cost of the man's meal from her wages before telling her that her shifts were being cut from six to four starting next week. Low revenue, he said. They both knew the real reason. She had refused to let him put his hand on her waist three weeks ago, and this was how men like Rick collected.
The October wind came off the water and cut through her jacket like it wasn't there. She had bought that jacket at a thrift store three years earlier for five dollars, and the lining had torn out last winter, and she wore it anyway because it was the only thing she owned that shielded her at all.
The bus stop was a five-minute walk. The last bus came in fifteen minutes, if it came at all. If she missed it, she would walk two hours home through streets where women like her sometimes vanished and nobody filed a report that mattered.
She quickened her pace, head down, eyes on the pavement. She had learned not to look into the dark mouths of alleys, not to be curious about sounds, not to involve herself in anything that was not her business. In this part of the city, curiosity got people killed.
But the darkness did not give her a choice that night.
As she passed the alley beside the bus stop, she heard something. Small. Faint. The sound of someone breathing who could not get enough air.
She stopped.
Every instinct she had screamed at her to keep walking. Do not turn back. Do not look. You have nothing to give anyone.
The sound came again, and it did not sound like an adult.
Elena turned into the alley.
The streetlight reached about fifteen feet in. Past that, the dark was total. But fifteen feet was enough. A small shape lay curled on the wet concrete, and the light caught the pale gold of hair spread out across the pavement like discarded silk.
Elena ran.
The girl was six or seven. She wore a white dress that must have cost more than Elena's rent, now soaked and stained, and she was not moving. Elena dropped to her knees on the icy ground and put a hand flat against the child's chest.
A heartbeat. Weak. Wrong. It fluttered under her palm like something trapped, and then paused, and then fluttered again.
The girl's lips were blue. Her skin was the color of old paper. Cold sweat beaded along her forehead, and when Elena touched her face, the child's eyes opened.
Elena nearly fell backward.
They were silver. Not gray — silver, like molten metal, like something that had no business being in a human face.
Papa, the girl whispered. Papa, I'm scared.
Then her eyes closed, and her breathing went shallow and slow, and Elena's hands started shaking so hard she could barely hold her phone.
She dialed 9-1-1 and stopped with her thumb over the green button.
Because the girl's sleeve had ridden up, and on her small wrist was a silver bracelet, heavy and expensive, engraved with a black rose and a ring of sharp thorns.
Everyone in this city knew that mark. The black rose of the Corsetti family. The people whose names you did not say out loud. The people whose cars did not stop at red lights. The people whose enemies floated down the harbor and were never mentioned in the paper.
Elena's hand froze.
She knew exactly what the police would do if they came. They would see the bracelet. They would call someone. And whatever happened after that, it would not be her business anymore, and it would not be safe for this child.
Or she could walk away. She could stand up right now and leave the girl in the dark and go home and never tell anyone, and she would live the rest of her life knowing she had done it.
The girl's lips moved.
Papa.
Elena searched the small pouch sewn into the dress with hands that would not stop trembling. She found a phone — not a child's toy, a real phone, the screen cracked from the fall but still lit. It was locked, but emergency calling was open, and the call history held exactly one number, called over and over across the last year.
The contact name was a single word.
PAPA.
Ten digits. Elena stared at them and understood, with a clarity that felt like ice water, that she was standing at a fork in her own life and that whichever way she went, she would not come back.
She pressed the number before she could change her mind.
It rang once. Twice. Her heart was beating so hard she could hear it over the wind.
Three times.
Then someone answered, and the voice that came through the line was low and unhurried and completely still — the voice of a man who had never once in his life had to raise it to be obeyed.
Who is this.
Sir, Elena said. Please don't hang up. I'm a waitress. I think your daughter is unconscious. She's lying in an alley.
The silence on the other end lasted half a second. It felt like a door closing somewhere very far away.
Where.
I don't know the address. She collapsed near the bus stop on Maple Street. She keeps calling your name.
Stay with her.
The line went dead.
Elena pulled off her jacket — the only thing she owned that kept the cold off her skin — and wrapped it around the small body, and lifted the girl's head into her lap.
Your father's coming, she said, and her teeth were chattering so badly she could barely get the words out. Just hold on.
The girl's eyes fluttered open. Are you an angel?
No, Elena said. I'm just somebody passing by.
The child's hand closed weakly around Elena's fingers. Mama said angels come when you're scared.
Elena had nothing to say to that. She was twenty-seven years old with eight hundred and sixty-three dollars in her account and a lump in her breast she could not afford to have looked at. She was not anybody's angel.
May you like
She sat in the freezing dark and held the girl and counted the seconds.
She had counted to two hundred and forty when the ground began to shake.
