Chapter 1
The back room of Il Posto smelled of garlic and leather and old money. A Persian rug the color of dried blood covered the floor, and at the center of the room, behind a desk of black walnut, Dominic Russo wrote in a ledger and did not look up.
Norah Hastings stood dripping on the rug. Her trench coat was cheap and soaked through. Beneath it she wore blue scrubs, wrinkled from a double shift, and her nursing badge hung from a lanyard around her neck like a name tag at a conference she’d never been invited to.
She counted the seconds the way she counted respirations and heartbeats and the minutes waiting for a code to break. One hundred eighty. Three minutes.
He had given her exactly three minutes, and she understood, with a cold clarity that felt like the rain, that this was the only gift he would ever give her.
The rain had stopped outside. Somewhere in the back of the restaurant, a man laughed. She could feel her own pulse in her throat.
She began to speak.
“Three days ago, a man named Pavel came to my apartment. He told me my brother Liam owes four hundred thousand dollars to the Tarasov syndicate. He told me Liam has three weeks before they put him on a cargo ship and he disappears into the Atlantic. I assume he’s already gone.”
Dominic’s pen moved. He did not lift his head.
“I don’t have the money. I’m a nurse. I have student debt and a radiator that rattles and a savings account that hasn’t seen four digits since before I graduated. But I know something you want.”
The pen stopped. The room went very quiet.
She swallowed. “The feds are auditing your real estate holdings. I know a woman in the FBI Boston field office — I’ve known her since high school. She’s the one reviewing your files. She told me, off the record, because she thought I’d find it funny, that they’re looking for a racketeering pattern. A way in.”
Now he looked up. Dark eyes. Silver at the temples. He wore a charcoal sweater, and when he moved, the air around him carried a trace of bergamot.
“You’re proposing a marriage,” he said. Not a question.
“A transaction. You need legitimacy. A wife who looks like she chose you. A nurse with a clean record and a rumpled life who shows up at your charity galas and smiles at the cameras and makes the auditors wonder why they’re wasting their budget on a man successful enough to have a wife who stands by him. I need my brother’s debt nullified. I need him to be able to come home.”
Dominic set down his pen. He came around the desk. He was taller than she’d expected, and he moved with the economy of a man who had never wasted a single gesture in his life.
“I don’t need a pretend wife,” he said.
Her stomach dropped. “Mr. Russo—”
“I need a wife.” He was very close now. His breath was warm. “Forever.”
Forever. The word hung in the garlic-scented air like a held breath.
“I don’t think you understand what I’m offering—”
“Norah Hastings.” He said her name like he was reading it off a chart. “Twenty-six. ER nurse at Mass General. Your brother borrowed the money, and the money is gone, and if I nullify the debt, the Tarasovs will call it a wound, and I will have to explain why I paid four hundred thousand dollars for a stranger.”
“I’m not a stranger. I’m—”
“You’re leverage,” he said quietly. “So am I. That’s what this is. Two people using each other, honestly, for the first time in either of our lives.”
He reached into his pocket and produced a ring. Gold, old, a diamond that caught the dim light and threw small fractured rainbows across the ledger.
“My grandmother wore this for fifty years,” he said. “My grandfather put it on her finger in a kitchen in Naples, and she never took it off. Not for the war. Not for the move. Not for anything.”
He took her left hand. His fingers were warm. The ring slid onto her finger and fit perfectly, like it had been sized for her in advance, like it had been waiting.
“Wait,” she said. “This is pretend. This is a transaction. You said—”
“I don’t change my mind,” he said. “Forever means forever.”
Behind her, Victor materialized. Gaunt, dead-eyed, polite. He held a folder. “The debt,” he said in a voice like a closing door, “is nullified. The Tarasovs have been informed that Miss Hastings is under the protection of the Russo family. She is, as of this moment, the fiancée.”
Fiancée. Norah looked down at the ring on her hand. It was heavier than she’d expected.
“Where do I go?” she asked.
“The estate,” Dominic said. “Carla will show you to the east wing. Don’t wander the west wing. Don’t touch the study. Be ready.”
“Ready for what?”
He looked at her for a long moment. “For the part.”
The car was black and warm and silent. Simon drove — a man with reptilian eyes who met her gaze in the rearview mirror exactly once and never looked again. The city fell away behind them, and then the lights fell away too, and the road climbed a cliff above the Atlantic until the estate loomed out of the dark like something that had grown there instead of being built. Massive. Stone. The kind of house that had been standing for a hundred years and would be standing for a hundred more after everyone inside it was dead.
Carla met her at the door. Iron-gray bun, no warmth. She led Norah up a staircase and along a corridor and opened a door onto a room the size of Norah’s entire apartment. Four-poster bed draped in silk. A fire crackling in a hearth you could stand inside. Windows that looked out over black water.
“It’s cold at night,” Carla said. “The fire never goes out. Don’t let it.”
Then she left.
May you like
Norah stood in the middle of the room. Her scrubs were still damp. Her badge was still on its lanyard. She could feel the ring on her finger, warm and foreign, like a second heartbeat.
She sank to the floor. She pulled her knees to her chest. She pressed her forehead to them, and she cried, alone, in a room bigger than her whole life had been, while the Atlantic hammered against the cliff below.
