THE MAFIA'S NEW BRIDE

THE SIZE OF THE CAGE

Nora didn't leave her room for the rest of that day.

She told herself it was because she didn't want to run into Marco again, didn't want to feel that cold, closed-door look aimed at her twice in one afternoon. But if she was honest — and she tried to be honest with herself, even when nobody else in this building bothered to be honest with her — it was because she didn't trust her own legs to carry her anywhere useful.

The room they'd given her was bigger than her entire childhood apartment. Bigger than the apartment and the hallway outside it and probably the stairwell too. A bed the size of a small boat. A window that took up the whole wall, glass so clean it looked like there was nothing between her and a two-hundred-foot drop at all.

She stood at that window for a long time, watching the city lights flicker on one by one as the sky went dark, and she thought about her mother's kitchen window, the one with the c***k in the corner that let a thin draft in every winter, the one her father kept saying he'd fix and never did.

*This window doesn't have a single flaw in it, * she thought. *Neither does this whole place. Everything here is perfect and cold and nothing like home.*

Her stomach growled, loud in the silence. She hadn't eaten since the car ride. Hadn't wanted to, really, but her body didn't seem to care what she wanted anymore.

She opened her door, slowly, and peered out into the hallway.

Empty. Quiet in that particular way, expensive places were quiet — no traffic noise, no neighbors arguing through thin walls, no dog barking three floors down. Just the low hum of central air and her own heartbeat, loud in her ears.

She started walking.

---

The apartment — if you could even call something this size an apartment — went on longer than she expected. Hallway after hallway, doors closed on rooms she had no names for. A gym. A private theater, dark and empty, seats lined up like they were waiting for an audience that never came. A library with more books than she'd ever seen outside an actual library, all of them looking untouched, spines uncracked, like they were there for show and nothing else.

"Nobody actually lives here," she thought, trailing her fingers along a shelf, raising a thin line of dust. *They just exist here. There's a difference.*

She found the kitchen eventually, cavernous and silver, and stood in the doorway a moment before a woman she didn't recognize — not Della, someone older, kinder-looking — glanced up from where she was wiping down a counter that already looked spotless.

"Oh. You must be Miss Alvarez." The woman's smile came quick, a little nervous. "Can I get you something?"

"I don't want to be any trouble."

"No trouble at all, dear. Sit, sit." She was already moving, pulling something from the fridge, warming it without being asked. "You look like you haven't eaten a proper meal in days."

"Try since Papa opened that door," Nora thought, but she didn't say it. Just sat at the massive island counter, feeling small on the tall stool, and watched the woman move with the easy comfort of someone who'd worked in this kitchen a long time.

"What's your name?"

"Marisol." The woman set a plate down in front of her — real food, warm, something that smelled like actual spices instead of whatever sterile nothing-smell filled the rest of the place. "Eat. You'll feel more like yourself."

Nora ate. It was the first thing all day that had tasted like anything at all.

"Marisol." She kept her voice light, careful. "Can I ask you something?"

The woman's hands stilled over the sink, just slightly. Nora was starting to recognize that particular stillness. Everyone in this building did it. The second a question got too close to something.

"Depends on what it is."

"Isabel."

The plate Marisol had been drying slipped an inch in her hands before she caught it.

"That's not a name we say around here, sweetheart." Her voice had gone soft, almost sad, nothing like Camila's sharp warning or Julian's edge of fear. Just tired. Genuinely tired, like a person carrying something heavy for a very long time. "Best you don't ask about her. Not to anyone. Not even me."

"Why not?"

"Because it hurts him." Simple. Final. "And when it hurts him, it hurts this whole house. You'll see soon enough."

She didn't say anything else after that, no matter how Nora tried to steer the conversation back, and eventually Nora gave up, thanked her for the food, and wandered back out into the maze of hallways with more questions than she'd started with.

---

She found the locked wing almost by accident.

It sat at the far end of the third floor, past a turn she hadn't noticed the first time, through a hallway that felt different from the rest of the apartment the second she stepped into it. Darker. Colder, somehow, though the temperature hadn't actually changed. The art on these walls was older, softer — landscapes instead of the sharp abstract pieces that hung everywhere else, like whoever had decorated this section had a completely different taste than whoever ran the rest of the house.

A single door sat at the very end, plain, unremarkable, except for the keypad mounted beside it where every other door in the apartment just had a regular handle.

Nora's pulse picked up.

*That's it. That's her wing.*

She didn't know how she knew. She just did, the same instinctive certainty you get standing near a drop-off in the dark, feeling the edge before you can see it.

She reached out, almost without deciding to, and pressed her palm flat against the cool door.

"You shouldn't be here."

She spun around so fast she nearly lost her footing.

A man stood at the end of the hall, arms crossed, built like a wall, wearing the same dark, unremarkable suit as the two men who'd shown up at her father's door three days ago. She hadn't even heard him approach. Hadn't heard a single footstep.

"I was just looking around."

"This wing's off-limits." His voice was flat, professional, the kind of voice that had said this exact sentence to other people before and would say it again after her. "Mr. Reyes's orders."

"I didn't know."

"You know now." He didn't move, didn't blink, just stood there blocking the only way back down the hall like a piece of furniture that happened to be alive. "I'll walk you back."

"That's not necessary."

"It is, actually." Something in his tone made it very clear this wasn't a request. "Mr. Reyes likes to know where you are in the house. All the time. Not just here."

The words landed slow, cold, settling into her stomach like a stone dropped into a well.

"All the time," she repeated.

"Every room's got eyes, Miss Alvarez." He said it plainly, almost bored, like he was explaining a house rule about taking your shoes off at the door. "Every hallway. Every exit. That's just how it works around here."

Nora stood frozen for a second, feeling the full weight of that sink in — not a home. Not even a very expensive home.

A cage. A beautiful, silent, watched cage, and she'd been locked inside it for less than twenty-four hours and already hadn't managed to take three steps without someone knowing exactly where she was.

"Walk me back, then," she said finally, her voice steadier than she felt.

He nodded once, fell into step beside her, silent the whole way.

Nora didn't look back at the locked door.

She didn't have to.

She could still feel it behind her the entire walk — and worse, she could feel something else now too, a fact she hadn't let herself fully believe until this exact moment:

Somewhere in this apartment, right now, Marco Reyes already knew she'd found it.