Chapter 2
She woke in silk sheets. The fabric was cool against her skin, and for one disoriented second she thought she was in a hotel, and then the weight of her left hand pulled her back to the truth.
The ring. She turned her hand over and looked at it in the gray morning light. Grandmother’s ring. Fifty years of a marriage she knew nothing about, and now it sat on her finger like a promise she’d never made.
There were boxes at the foot of the bed. Three of them, brown and expensive. She got up and opened them.
A cashmere sweater in dove gray. A pair of tailored trousers. Leather flats that fit her feet like gloves. And a note in sharp, angular handwriting: “Dining room. 8.”
She wore the cashmere. She told herself it was a tactical decision — that she was cold, that she was not going to be defeated by a sweater. She was lying to herself, and she knew it.
The dining room was larger than her entire apartment combined. A table of polished oak that could have seated twenty, and at its head, Dominic Russo, reading a newspaper, an untouched cup of coffee steaming beside him.
He looked up. “Better than scrubs.”
“I hate cashmere,” she said.
“It photographs better than scrubs.”
“I’m a nurse. I don’t photograph. I save lives.”
He folded the newspaper very precisely. “You’re going to photograph a great deal in the next few months. The gown fitting is Thursday. The gala is Friday.” He paused. “You’ll do fine.”
She sat. A plate appeared in front of her — eggs, toast, fruit, arranged with the precision of a man who had never once trusted someone else to do a job. “I don’t understand what the performance is,” she said. “You told me the feds are auditing. What does a wife do for you that a lawyer doesn’t?”
He set down his coffee. “The audit is a racketeering case. They’re building it. They need a pattern. A woman on my arm who looks like she married me because she loves me tells the jury a story the auditors can’t argue with. A man who risks everything for the woman he loves is a different kind of man than the one they’re building a file on.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“It’s accounting. And it works.”
“So I’m a prop.”
“You’re a performance.” He stood and came around the table and stopped behind her chair. She could feel the warmth of him at her back, the weight of his presence like a held breath. He leaned down. His breath smelled of bergamot and coffee and something underneath that belonged only to him.
“I’m not the dangerous part of this,” he said quietly. “Anton Tarasov will be at the gala. He’s the enforcer. Scar through his left eyebrow. He’s watching for cracks. He’s watching to see if you’re a pawn.”
“Why would he care if I’m a pawn?”
“Because if you look like a pawn, Alexi Tarasov will decide you’re available. And if you’re available, he’ll take you. And I won’t start a war over a pawn.”
She went very still. “But you would,” she said slowly, “start a war over a wife.”
He didn’t answer. He straightened, walked back around the table, and sat down, and picked up his newspaper.
“I understand,” she said. And she did. All at once, the way you understand an incision the moment the scalpel breaks skin.
He looked at her over the top of the paper. “The money your brother borrowed. He took it and he ran. He’s probably in Mexico by now, if he’s smart.” He set the paper down. “You must never look for him, Norah. Not now. Not ever. If you do, the Tarasovs will find him before you do, and they will use him to reach you, and I will have to make choices none of us want.”
“Choices like what?”
“Choices I’ve made before.” He picked up his coffee. “Your family is one person now. Me. You’ll find that’s more than enough.”
The days that followed were a kind of quarantine. She was given the library — floor-to-ceiling shelves, a fireplace, a window that looked out over the gardens. She read. She waited. She ate at the long table with a man who said very little and watched everything.
On Thursday, Beatrice the seamstress arrived. Sixty years old, a measuring tape around her neck like a priest’s stole. She fitted Norah in a midnight blue silk gown that fell like water. Pins bit into her ribs. Norah stood on the pedestal and felt like a stranger in her own skin.
The door opened. Dominic entered. He dismissed Beatrice’s assistants with a single glance, and the old woman retreated to the corner with impressive speed.
“Leave us,” he said. She left.
He crossed the room and stepped onto the pedestal behind Norah. Close enough that she felt the displaced air.
She watched his hands in the mirror as he took the hem pins and knelt behind her, adjusting the fall of the silk with a concentration she had seen only in surgeons.
His fingers brushed her bare spine. Utilitarian. Clinical. The touch of a man doing a job.
She jolted anyway. A current ran down her back that had nothing to do with the cold.
He didn’t comment. He just kept pinning.
“They don’t know what you are,” she said, to fill the silence, to stop the shiver.
“Who?”
“Everyone. The people at the gala. Your men. They don’t know that you can do this.” She gestured vaguely at the gown. “Careful work. Patient hands.”
“Patient hands,” he repeated. “I’ve killed more men than I’ve pinned hems.”
“I’ve held a man’s chest cavity open in the ER while his heart stopped twice. I’ve watched his lungs inflate like something underwater.” She looked at his reflection. “Which of us do you think is more honest?”
He met her eyes in the mirror. For a long moment, neither of them moved.
May you like
“Blood on linoleum is honest,” he said. “These people will smile while they gut you. You’ll learn to tell the difference.”
Friday came. The gala.
