The dress hangs on the back of my door like a beautiful threat.
Black silk. Not white. Never white.
I told Lorenzo's seamstress exactly what I wanted, and the poor woman looked at me like I'd asked her to sew my own funeral shroud. Maybe I had. White is for virgins and innocence, for girls who believe in fairy tales and happily ever afters. I stopped being that girl the night I watched my family bleed out on marble floors.
Black is honest. Black doesn't pretend.
I've been staring at it for the past twenty minutes, a glass of whiskey untouched on the nightstand beside me. The bedroom they've given me in the Moretti compound is obscenely large—all cream walls and gilded furniture that costs more than most people make in a year. Everything here is designed to impress, to intimidate. Even
