Page 55 of Wicked Mafia Mistake
"Nobody." I grip the edge of the display case and breathe. In through my nose, out through my mouth, the way I've been breathing through panic since I was fifteen years old. My handsare shaking but my face is calm. "He's nobody, Bree. Watch the register. I'll be right back."
I walk to the front door on legs that feel numb beneath me. Push through it. The cool morning air hits my bare face, damp and sharp with the smell of rain on concrete and exhaust from the street. I scan the sidewalk for Lorenzo but he's gone, absorbed into the foot traffic of Wicker Park as cleanly as if he was never here.
I turn toward the parking lot and where the SUV should be.
Savine is in the driver's seat. His partner is in the passenger seat. Neither of them moves. The engine is off. The wipers are still. Rain collects on the windshield in heavy drops that distort the shapes inside, and something about the angle of Savine's head, the way it tilts forward with his chin resting against his chest, stops me three feet from the car.
"Savine?" My voice comes out thin, swallowed by the wet air.
I take one more step. Look through the driver's side window, which sits halfway down, rain beading on the glass edge.
There’s blood. It’s dark and thick, almost black against the white cotton of Savine's shirt, soaking through the fabric from a wound beneath his jaw. His eyes are open and fixed on nothing, the brown irises dull, the life behind them gone.
His hand hangs over the center console, limp, fingers dangling over the gearshift. Callan slumps against the passenger door in the same stillness. The same dark stain spreads across his chest. His head tips against the rain-speckled window at an angle that living necks don't hold.
Two clean entry wounds. No struggle. No shell casings on the dashboard. No sign that either man had time to reach for the weapons still holstered beneath their jackets. Professional. Fast. Done while Lorenzo was inside my shop.
The metallic smell of blood reaches me through the open window, warm and thick and wrong against the clean rain.
I press my hand over my mouth and grip the car door with my other hand and my knees buckle. I catch myself against the side of the SUV, my palm sliding on the wet metal, and I stare through the window at two dead men who were alive an hour ago because I insisted on coming to my shop.
I did this. I pushed back against the guards' hesitation. I made the argument about the dresses and the rain and the twelve thousand dollars. I stood in Massimo's kitchen with coffee in my hand and told them to keep me safe at my boutique and they listened and now they are dead in the front seat of a car parked outside my door while I steamed wrinkles and arranged hangers and talked to the man who ordered their deaths about Egyptian cotton.
The guilt hits my stomach so hard I double over, one hand on the cold metal of the SUV, the other pressed against my mouth, and I breathe through my fingers and stare at the wet concrete under my heels until the nausea passes and my vision stops tunneling and the sidewalk solidifies under my feet.
And then something shifts.
Underneath the horror and the guilt and the shaking hands, something harder takes shape. Something old and familiar, a muscle I developed at fifteen when a man put his hands on me and I fought back even though I couldn't win. That girl didn'tfreeze. That girl swung her fists at a man twice her size and screamed until someone came through that door.
I'm done freezing. I'm done running. I'm done hiding behind lipstick and contracts and men who promise to protect me while other men die in parking lots because of my choices.
Lorenzo Ferraro walked into my shop and smiled at me while two men bled out on the other side of the wall. He touched my fabrics and complimented my taste and told me contracts can be broken and people can be broken, beautiful things especially. He did it with the confidence of someone who has never faced a single consequence.
That ends now.
I pull my phone from my pocket. My hands are shaking but my voice is steady when Massimo picks up on the first ring.
"Tesoro, where are?—"
"The guards are dead." I cut him off because I don't have room for tenderness right now. Not with blood on the other side of this car door and the metallic smell of it mixing with rain and exhaust. "Lorenzo was here. He was inside my shop, Massimo. The stench of him burns my nostrils even now."
Silence. Two seconds. Three. When he speaks, his voice is flat and cold and stripped of everything except the man underneath the lawyer.
"Don't move. Don't touch anything. I'm coming."
I hang up. Slide the phone into my pocket. I stand on the sidewalk outside my boutique and for the first time in a long time, I actually feel the minute solid steel slides into my backbone.
Cinderella lost her slipper running away. I'm keeping both of mine and walking straight into this fight. Fuck Lorenzo.
Fourteen
Harlon
My father told me once that every contract tells two stories. The one written in ink and the one hidden between the lines. He went to prison because he stopped reading the second story. I never made that mistake.
Polaris sits beside me at the reception desk, her raven hair draped over one shoulder, her pen moving across a column of figures with quiet precision. She wears a dark blouse buttoned to the collar, sleeves pulled to her wrists despite the warmth of the room. She always covers her skin. I've stopped asking why. Some answers announce themselves when they're ready.
Seven months ago she arrived at Genesis wrapped in my jacket, shivering so hard her teeth cracked against each other like dice in a cup. Bruises covered her face, her arms, her ribs. Her blue eyes were the only part of her that wasn't broken, and even those held a vacancy that made my chest feel like someone had reached inside and squeezed. The Volkov brothers had taken her, used her, fed her through Society 69's auction pipeline where women are priced the way traders price livestock and soldto the highest bidder in a church basement that God stopped watching a long time ago.
