Chapter 1
Ava smells the exhaust before she hears the engine, and for a second she thinks it's just the bus that idles too long outside the shop on Tuesdays, the one with the broken muffler that rattles the front window glass. It isn't Tuesday.
She's got her keys out already, one wedged between her knuckles the way Sofia taught her a decade ago, back when that particular trick still felt like paranoia instead of habit. The lock on the flower shop door sticks in humid weather, and it's humid tonight, the kind of thick Valeria air that makes her shirt cling to her back between the shop and the corner, and she's fighting with the deadbolt when the car actually pulls up across the street.
Black. Low to the ground. Engine so quiet it barely disturbs the pigeons picking at something greasy near the curb.
She doesn't turn around. Ten years of not turning around too fast.
The door opens before she finishes with the lock, and a man gets out, unhurried, like the sidewalk belongs to him, which, this close to the De Luca side of town, it probably does. Ava's stomach does something ugly and immediate, not fear exactly, more like recognition arriving a half second before her brain catches up to explain it.
She knows that jaw. She's seen it in a photograph Sofia kept folded in a drawer for years, a boy of maybe fifteen standing stiff next to a man who isn't alive anymore, and it's aged into this. Into him.
"Ava Marchetti," he says, and her name in his mouth sounds like an accusation dressed up as a fact. "That's the one you're using these days."
She gets the deadbolt to finally turn. Doesn't answer.
"I could stand here pretending I'm not sure," he says, crossing the street without checking for traffic, which there isn't any of, this block goes dead by nine most nights. "But that would be insulting to both of us."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"You do, though." He stops a few feet from her, close enough that she can smell something like cedar and gun oil, an odd combination that she'll think about later and wish she hadn't noticed.
"You're the only person who walked out of my father's house the night he died. And here you are, tten years later, selling carnations two neighborhoods over."
"Maybe I like flowers."
He almost laughs at that. Not quite a laugh. Something that starts in that direction and gets called back before it finishes.
"You're going to want to come with me," he says. "I'd rather ask you nicely once."
"And if I say no?"
He doesn't answer right away, and in the pause, Ava hears a dog three streets over, barking at nothing, the way dogs do, and somewhere behind her the bus with the broken muffler finally pulls away from its stop, engine grinding.
"Then it happens anyway," he says finally. "Just slower, and with more people watching."
Two more men are out of the car now. Ava hadn't noticed them get out, which unsettles her more than the men themselves do, and she's running the math in her head, the distance to the alley behind the shop, whether Elena will worry if she's not home in twenty minutes, whether worry is even the right word for what her sister will feel if Ava simply doesn't come back one night, after everything.
"My sister," she says. "She's not part of this."
"She doesn't have to be." His voice softens on that, barely, an inch of give in an otherwise flat wall. "Not unless you make her part of it. Get in the car, Ava."
She thinks about running. She's fast, she knows this neighborhood's gaps and shortcuts better than any of these men could, but the flower shop is between her and Elena's building, not behind her, and if this turns into a chase it doesn't stay contained to this block.
So she gets in the car.
The seats smell like leather cleaner, chemical and sharp, and her thigh sticks slightly to the seam where the leather's cracked. Roman slides in across from her a beat later, and the door shuts with a sound too solid to be anything but expensive.
"Where are we going," she asks, mostly to hear her own voice do something other than shake.
"Somewhere private."
"That's not an answer."
"No," he agrees, and looks out his window instead of at her, jaw working like he's chewing on something he hasn't decided whether to say. "It isn't."
The car pulls away from the curb, and Ava watches her own reflection ghost over the passing storefronts, and she's still trying to figure out what to say next when Roman speaks again, quieter this time.
"You're not what I expected."
"What'd you expect?"
He doesn't answer that either. He just keeps looking out the window, and Ava notices, absurdly, that there's a thread coming loose on his cuff, unraveling slightly with every small movement of his wrist, and for some reason that detail is the one that finally makes her hands stop shaking.
The gates ahead of them are already opening.
