HIS UNSIGNED MERCY

Eight months of lying, and it ended because one old man looked at me for too long. Ten minutes earlier, I was in the service corridor behind the ballroom, counting. Forty-one steps from the kitchen door to the east stairwell. Six cameras between the elevator and Dante Moretti's study. Two guards on that study door on a normal night, three tonight, because the Don was finally home. I count when I'm scared. I started six years ago, the week my father was shot in a parking garage and the whole city agreed he'd deserved it. Stairs, exits, the seconds between footsteps. It doesn't fix anything. It just gives my brain somewhere to stand. "Carter!" Mrs. Halloran's voice cut down the hall like a dropped pan. "Are you hiding?" "Counting napkins." "Count them faster." I tugged my sleeve down over my wrist. The brass compass hung on its cord under my uniform, warm from my skin. My mother gave it to me the night before she disappeared. She said, Keep it where nobody can take it, and then she kissed my forehead like she was apologizing. It's the last thing I have of her. That and a lot of questions. Marta caught me at the kitchen door and pressed a bread roll into my hand without looking at me. The head cook had arms like a boxer, and for months she'd been feeding the thin new girl and pretending she wasn't. "Eat," she muttered. "You look like a coat hanger." "I'm fine." "You're a liar. Eat anyway." She had no idea. I ate it in four bites, standing up, and went to work. The ballroom of the Moretti Grand looked like money had thrown up on it, but elegantly. Three hundred guests. Chandeliers the size of small cars. A string quartet playing something sad and expensive. Men in dark suits stood in clusters with their hands quiet, which I'd learned was the most dangerous way for a man's hands to be. I carried a tray of champagne and made myself invisible. It's a skill. You keep your eyes at chest height, your face pleasant and empty, your shoulders a little rounded. Eight months, and not one person in this building had really looked at me. Teo Bruno, Dante's head of security, tapped my tray as he passed and took a glass he never drank from. He had the kind of grin that made you want to tell him your secrets. "Easy, Carter. You look like you're casing the place." My stomach dropped. "I'm terrified of dropping this." "Good. Terror's good for posture." He winked and was gone. I made myself breathe. Then the room changed. It didn't go quiet all at once. It leaned. Three hundred people turned a few degrees toward the doors, like flowers, and the quartet lost its place and found it again. Dante Moretti walked in. I'd seen photographs. Photographs lie by making people smaller. He was tall, in a black suit, no tie, no watch, no rings, nothing on him that said what he was worth, which somehow said it louder. His face looked built for giving orders and then never used for anything else. Thirty-four years old, and he carried himself like a man who'd stopped expecting good news a long time ago. He passed four feet from me. I counted it. I kept my eyes on his chest. Beside him walked Lucian Rossi, silver hair, kind face, one hand on Dante's shoulder like a father at a graduation. I knew everything about Lucian. He'd raised Dante after his parents died. He was the first person any family called when there was trouble, and people said he hadn't raised his voice in thirty years. He stopped in front of me and took a glass from my tray. "Grazie, cara." "Of course, sir." He didn't drink. He held the glass and watched me, and the air around us went thin. "What's your name?" "Sienna. Sienna Carter." "Carter." He smiled, slowly. "Funny. You stand like a dead man I used to know. Weight on the left, chin a little up, like you're waiting for someone to hit you." My hands wanted to shake. I counted. One. Two. Three. "I'm sorry, sir. I'm just nervous." "Dante." Lucian didn't turn his head. "Come look at this girl's face." Dante stopped. He turned. For the first time in eight months, somebody looked straight at me. His eyes were grey and very tired, and they went over my face once, forehead, nose, jaw, like he was reading a document. I saw the exact second something in them went cold. "Name," he said. "Sienna Carter." "The one you were born with." The quartet had stopped. I don't remember when. I'd rehearsed this moment on a hundred sleepless nights. Deny it. Cry. Run. But he was looking at me, and the old man was smiling, and my mother's compass was pressed against my ribs like a hand. I was so tired of being someone else. "Sienna Cole," I said. Nobody moved. Somewhere, a glass was set down very carefully. "Marco Cole's daughter," Dante said. "Yes." "You've worked in my house for eight months." "I've scrubbed your floors for eight months, Mr. Moretti. You never noticed." It was the wrong thing to say, and I'd say it again. Somebody in the crowd actually gasped. Dante's jaw tightened. He turned to the room, and when he spoke it wasn't loud. It was worse. Quiet carries when everyone is listening. "Gentlemen. This is the daughter of the man who sold my father to the Commission." "That's not true. My father never—" "Don't." One syllable. It landed like a slap. "Don't say his name to me." Something rose in my throat, hot and ugly. Six years of it. "You don't know what happened. None of you do—" "I know I watched my mother's coffin go into the ground when I was nine years old." His voice didn't shake. His hands did, just slightly. I saw it. "Cole is a stain on this house. She came here under a lie to rob me, or worse. Whatever she was to anyone in this building, she isn't now." He didn't look at me again. "No wages. No coat. Nothing leaves with her but what she walked in with. Get her out." Two guards took my arms. One of them I'd made coffee for. He wouldn't meet my eyes. They dragged me backward across the marble, my heels skidding, and the cord around my neck caught on a buckle and snapped. The compass hit the floor. It spun. It skated across the polished stone and stopped against the pointed heel of a green silk shoe. The woman in the shoe bent down. Dark hair, red lips, a face like a magazine cover. She turned the compass over once in her fingers, read the tiny letters on the back, and closed her hand around it. She looked at me. Not unkindly. More like I was a sum she hadn't finished. "Wait. That's mine. Please, that's mine—" Nobody listened. At the doors, I heard the guard behind me ask Lucian a question I'd spend the next year wishing I hadn't heard. "Does she go to the river, or the street?" "Dante?" Lucian said, soft as ever. Three hundred people didn't breathe. "The street," Dante said. "For now." "And the paper?" "I'll sign it in the morning." They threw me out the service door into the rain. No coat, no phone, thirty-one dollars folded in my shoe. The door shut behind me and the lock clicked. I stood on the wet pavement, shaking, counting. One. Two. Three. Across the street, a black car I hadn't noticed switched on its headlights. Somebody in it hadn't heard about morning