Debt of Blood and Silk

The violin case was open on her kitchen table, and a man she'd never seen before was holding her bow up to the light like he was pricing it. Sienna stopped in the doorway with her keys still in her hand. Grocery bag digging into her wrist. The apartment smelled wrong, cologne over old coffee, and there were two of them, not one. The second man stood by her window with his hands folded in front of him, watching the street like he expected someone to come up it. "That's a hundred-year-old bow," she said. "Put it down." The one at the table looked up. Mid-thirties, maybe. Suit that fit too well for a guy breaking into a third-floor walk-up in Dorchester. He set the bow across the open case, gentle, almost careful, and that carefulness scared her more than if he'd dropped it. "Sienna Rossi." Not a question. "You're in my apartment." "We are." He didn't move from the chair. "Marco Rossi's your brother." Her stomach dropped the way it did on the downbeat of something she'd already rehearsed and still got wrong. She set the grocery bag down slow, both hands free now, and did the math she'd been avoiding for six weeks. Marco hadn't answered his phone since Tuesday. Marco had asked her for money in March and she'd said no because she didn't have it, and he'd said don't worry about it, and she should have worried about it. "What did he do." "Borrowed against a business that doesn't like being stiffed." The man at the window finally turned around. Older, gray at the temples, a face like he'd stopped being surprised by anything a long time ago. "Eleven million and change. He's not answering for it. You're going to." She laughed before she could stop herself, short and wrong. "I'm a violinist. I make forty-one thousand dollars a year before taxes. I don't have eleven dollars, let alone eleven million." "Nobody's asking you to write a check." The one at the table stood, and he was taller than she'd registered, close enough now that she had to tip her head back to hold his eyes. "Mr. Vance would like to speak with you. Tonight." "Who's Mr. Vance?" Neither of them answered that. The older one crossed the room and picked her coat off the hook by the door, held it out like he was a waiter, like this was a restaurant and not her home with two strangers in it and her brother's name hanging in the air like a debt she'd never signed for. She didn't take the coat. "If I say no?" "Then Marco stays exactly where he is right now, and that's not somewhere you want him to stay." The younger one's voice didn't change at all when he said it, and that was worse than if he'd threatened her outright. Flat. Like he was reading a weather report. "You've got maybe ten minutes to grab whatever you need. We're not going to hurt you, Miss Rossi. Nobody's said anything about hurting you." "That's supposed to make me feel better?" "It's supposed to be true." She looked past him at her violin case, still open on the table, the bow lying across the ribs like something asleep. She'd had it since she was nineteen, the year she'd finally saved enough to trade up from the student model, and some part of her brain, the part that hadn't caught up to what was happening, was furious they'd touched it without washing their hands first. "Where's Marco right now." "Somewhere safe. For the moment." The older man still had her coat held out. "That depends a little on you." She took the coat. --- The car was black, unmarked, the kind of clean that meant someone got paid specifically to keep it that way. Nobody put a hand on her, nobody blindfolded her, and somehow the ordinariness of it was the thing that made her hands shake once she was in the back seat, out of their sight lines, her violin case wedged between her knees because she hadn't been willing to leave it behind and neither of them had told her not to bring it. They drove north out of the city, past the harbor, streetlights thinning into dark the farther they went, water on one side of the road catching what little light there was. Sienna watched the reflection of her own face in the window and tried to remember the last thing she'd said to Marco. Something small. Something about groceries, probably. She hadn't told him she loved him. She never did, because they always assumed they'd get another chance to say it, and now she was in a car she hadn't agreed to be in, heading somewhere she hadn't agreed to go, because her little brother had borrowed eleven million dollars from a person named Vance and hadn't told her. The compound, when they reached it, didn't look like what she'd pictured. No gates with spikes, no dogs. A long drive through trees, gravel under the tires, and then a house that looked like it had been standing since before the harbor had a name, brick gone dark with age, glass additions grafted on at angles that should have looked wrong and instead looked deliberate. Light spilled out from tall windows onto a lawn that ran straight down to black water and a private dock where three boats sat motionless, ropes taut, like they were waiting for permission to leave. The older man opened her door. "Mr. Vance is in the study." "Is Marco here?" "No." "Then where—" "Ask him." He nodded toward the house. Didn't touch her, didn't rush her, just waited with his hands folded the same way he had in her kitchen, until she got out of the car on her own. She carried the violin case up the front steps herself. Nobody offered to take it, and she wouldn't have let them. The front door opened before she reached it. Not a butler, not staff, a man she assumed had opened it himself, standing back to let her through into a front hall with a ceiling two stories up and a floor so polished it threw her own reflection back at her, blurred, unfamiliar. She stopped just inside the threshold. "Miss Rossi." The voice came from a doorway to her left, unhurried, the kind of voice that had never once had to raise itself to be obeyed. "You brought the violin." She turned toward it. A man stood in the frame of a study door, jacket off, sleeves rolled to the forearm, a glass of something dark held loose in one hand like he'd forgotten it was there. Dark hair, dark eyes that didn't move off her face the way most people's did within the first three seconds of looking at a stranger. He wasn't smiling. He wasn't not smiling either. His face gave her nothing to read, and that absence was its own kind of statement. "I wasn't going to leave it with your men." "No." A small tilt of his head, almost approval. "I wouldn't have either." "Where's my brother." "Not here." He set the glass down on a table by the door, unhurried, like her question hadn't landed with any particular weight. "Marco's debt is eleven million, four hundred thousand dollars, and he's disappeared rather than discuss repayment terms with people who don't appreciate being avoided. You're going to stay here until we've worked out what happens next." "Stay here." She heard her own voice go flat, disbelieving. "You kidnapped me." "I invited you." He said it without inflection, without apology, like the distinction mattered to him and he expected it to matter to her too. "You got in the car." "Because your men told me my brother would get hurt if I didn't." "He might," Dante said. "That part was true." Something in her chest went cold and very still. She adjusted her grip on the violin case, felt the worn leather handle bite into her palm, and made herself hold his eyes instead of looking away first. "So what am I. Collateral?" "For now." He studied her another second, the way she imagined he studied a shipping manifest, looking for the one line that didn't add up. "Ellis will show you to your room.”