At 11:43 p.m., I learned that my husband had seventeen minutes left to kill me, and that he had already signed for it. I had only gone into his study to find my phone, which I'd left on the edge of his desk after our anniversary dinner. Dante's private rooms were forbidden to me, a rule so old in our marriage that I had stopped feeling it, the way you stop feeling a ring until someone asks you to take it off. The lamp was still burning. Beneath a stack of confidential files, a single page lay slightly crooked, as if it had been placed there in a hurry, and my own name stared up at me from the top of it in capital letters. ISABELLA MORETTI. Under it, three lines in the clean, merciless typeface of a legal document: EXECUTION AUTHORISED. MIDNIGHT DEADLINE. A payment confirmation had been stapled to the corner, along with a sheet of instructions about where I would be and when, mapped out with a precision that made my skin crawl. At the bottom was a signature I knew better than my own, the sharp, slanted D I had watched him use on a thousand documents while I pretended not to admire it. I read the page again, as if the letters might rearrange themselves into something kinder. They held their ground. This was the man who had kissed my forehead that morning and promised to be home before midnight. He was the same man who had sent a necklace worth more than the house I grew up in, and whom I had slowly, stupidly, against every warning I'd been given, started to love. Everyone in Italy knew what Dante Moretti was capable of. His enemies vanished, his rivals surrendered, and the men who defied him regretted surviving long enough to do it. I had simply never imagined that the list had a place for me, and perhaps that was the whole problem. Perhaps I had mistaken possession for affection and been too flattered to notice the difference. A floorboard creaked behind me. I turned so fast the paper nearly left my fingers. Dante stood in the doorway in a black suit, his tie pulled loose, the collar of his white shirt open, his dark hair disordered in a way it never was in public. His face gave me nothing. His eyes went from my face to the page in my hand, and something moved behind them that I had not expected and could not name until later. It was not guilt, and it was not surprise. It was fear, there and gone inside a second, but I had seen it. "Where did you find that?" I held up the page. "Is it true?" He stepped inside and shut the door with a quiet click that sounded far too final. "Give me the document, Isabella." "Answer me first." "I asked you to give it to me." "And I asked whether you ordered my death!" My voice cracked on the last word, and I hated him for hearing it. He came toward me slowly, the way you would approach a frightened animal you could not afford to lose. "Whatever you think you're holding, you don't understand it." I laughed, and it came out ugly. "Of course. I'm your wife when you need a perfect marriage to display, and the moment I ask a question I'm too ignorant for the answer." "That is not what I said." "Then say what you meant." He said nothing. I looked down at the signature again, then back up at him. "Did you sign this?" "No." It came too fast, a door slammed before I could see what was behind it. "You're lying." "Do you really think I would lie to you about this?" "Would you lie to me about anything?" The question landed harder than I'd intended, and for the first time that night Dante looked away. That was all the confirmation I needed. I backed up a step and pressed the paper against my chest, and when he reached for me I raised my hand. "Don't touch me." He stopped. Three feet of carpet lay between us, and it felt like an ocean. "Someone wants you dead," he said quietly. "I can read." "Then you can understand that if you stay in this room arguing with me, you may not live long enough to be sorry." He drew a gun from beneath his jacket. I looked at the weapon, and then at him, and something in me went very calm and very cold. "You're threatening me now?" "I am trying," he said through his teeth, "to keep you alive." A gunshot cracked somewhere outside. I screamed. Dante seized my waist and dragged me behind the desk as a second shot burst through the window and glass rained across the floorboards, and then his body was over mine, one arm cradling my head, the other raising his gun toward the dark. Down the corridor came the sound of running feet, then shouting, then another shot. "Stay down," he ordered, his forehead against mine. "Whatever happens, you do not leave my side." I wanted to tell him I hated him. I wanted to tell him I would sooner die than trust him again. Instead I caught myself gripping his jacket with both hands, holding on as if he were the only solid thing left in a collapsing world. The study door flew open. One of his men stumbled in, blood spreading through his shoulder. "Boss. They're inside. They came through the eastern entrance." Dante rose, pulling me behind him, his voice terrifyingly even. "Secure the house. Nobody leaves." The man vanished. Dante turned to me, and his eyes dropped to the page still crushed in my fist. When he spoke, it was almost to himself. "That document was supposed to be destroyed." The air left my lungs. "How would you know that?" He reached for it and I snatched it out of range. "Dante. How do you know it was supposed to be destroyed?" He glanced at the shattered window, then leaned close until his voice was barely a breath against my ear. "Because I have spent three weeks searching for the original." "Why?" The lights went out. A hand clamped over my mouth. Cold steel settled against my throat, and a stranger's voice slid into my ear, almost tender. "Tell your husband his time is up." Then I was being dragged backwards into the dark, and I heard Dante roar my name.

The blade bit just as Dante spun toward the sound of my scream. "Drop the weapon." His voice was so cold that even the man holding me hesitated. I could see almost nothing. The emergency lights had failed, smoke curled through the broken window, and all I knew was the arm locked around my ribs and the edge pressed beneath my jaw. "One more step, Moretti, and your wife dies." Dante stopped. In a year of marriage I had seen him furious, bored, amused and ruthless, but I had never seen what crossed his face now, and it frightened me more than his anger ever had. It was helplessness. "Let her go." "You should have followed instructions," the stranger said, almost lazily. Dante's gun stayed level, but his finger slid away from the trigger. "Name your price." "Your empire." "Take it." The word went through me like a second blade. Behind me, even the stranger had fallen silent. In the dark I could feel Dante looking at me and nowhere else. "Take all of it," he said. "The money, the territory, the businesses. But if you hurt her, I will spend the rest of my life teaching you what regret means." The knife pressed harder. A sharp sting bloomed along my neck and I gasped, and Dante's whole body changed. "Stop!" The stranger swore. A gunshot split the room, and I squeezed my eyes shut so tightly I saw colours. The arm around me went slack. I stumbled forward, and Dante caught me before I hit the floor. When I dared to look, a man lay crumpled near the doorway, his weapon skidded several feet from his hand. Dante lowered his gun and took my face between his palms, turning it toward the weak light from the window. "Look at me. Isabella, look at me." His hands were shaking. It shocked me more than the gunshot had. Dante Moretti had stood before armed enemies without blinking and watched older men beg for mercy across his table, and yet his fingers trembled as they traced the thin line of blood beneath my jaw. "It's nothing," I said. "Never say that to me again." Before I could answer he pulled me hard against his chest, and for one dangerous second I let myself stay there, wanting to believe that the fear in his eyes meant he loved me. Then I remembered the contract, and pushed him away. "Don't. You can't pretend to care about me when you can't explain why someone ordered my execution." "That man did not work for me." "You seem very sure." "Because if he did, he would not have come into my house with orders to kill you." "Maybe you hired someone else." His eyes narrowed. "You honestly believe I would arrange your murder and then risk my life to prevent it?" "I don't know what to believe anymore!" The words rang off the walls and then left a silence behind them. I thought he would shout. Instead he holstered the gun, shrugged off his jacket, and settled it around my shoulders with a gentleness that felt like an accusation. "Your room. Now." "I'm not going anywhere with you." "That wasn't a request." "And you wonder why I don't trust you." A muscle jumped in his jaw. "Hate me if it helps you sleep, Isabella. But you will not spend another night unprotected while someone is hunting you." He took my hand, and I should have pulled away. I followed him instead, not because I trusted him, but because the dead man on the floor suggested that Dante might be the only person in the house who understood how bad things were. By the time we reached my bedroom it had been turned into a fortress. Two armed guards stood in the corridor, a third waited on the balcony, and a fourth was testing every window lock. Dante dismissed all of them except Marco, his head of security, a heavy, unsmiling man who looked as if he had not slept since the previous decade. "Nobody enters without my permission. Nobody leaves the house without being searched. I want every camera recording from the last forty-eight hours, and I want to know how the gunmen got in." "And the dead man, boss?" "Find out who sent him." Marco hesitated. "There is something else. The security system was shut down from inside the house. The cameras were off for exactly seven minutes." Seven minutes. Long enough for someone to walk into the study and place a document where I would find it. Long enough to arrange all of it. A chill ran down my arms that had nothing to do with the broken window. Dante turned to me. "Who knew you would be in my study tonight?" "No one." "Think." "I went for my phone. I told nobody." "Who knew you had left it there?" "I don't know! Stop interrogating me." I stood so abruptly that his jacket slid from my shoulders. "You want answers? So do I. I want to know why my name is on that page, and why you've been hunting for it. And I want to know what really happened to my father." The room went still. Dante did not move at all, and somehow that made him more dangerous than any gun. "What did you say?" "My father. The man who died under suspicious circumstances right before you decided that marrying his daughter would be politically convenient." He crossed the room slowly. "Who told you his death was suspicious?" "No one had to. I have a brain." "Answer the question." I lifted my chin. "Does it matter?" "Yes. Because the people who killed your father may be the same people trying to kill you." My anger faltered. He pulled out his phone, opened a photograph, and held it toward me. A man stood in the rain outside a warehouse, beside a black car, speaking to someone whose face the camera had missed. I knew him at once, the slope of his shoulders, the way he held his head. Adrian. My brother, the only family I had left. "When was this taken?" My voice barely worked. "Three days before your father died." "Why do you have it?" "Because I have spent a year investigating his murder." His expression softened, but only slightly. "Your father was the last man to speak with mine before he was killed." I knew Dante's father was dead. Everyone knew. No one had ever told me the two deaths were connected. "The man my investigators believe ordered my father's murder," Dante said, and stopped, and I felt my heart slamming against my ribs. "Who?" He looked straight into my eyes. "Your father."

I slapped him before I had decided to. The crack of it rang through the bedroom, and Dante let his head turn with the blow and slowly brought it back, as though he had expected nothing less. "Take it back," I whispered. "I cannot take back what I believe to be true." "My father was not a murderer." "You married into this family knowing what people said about us. Do not pretend he was incapable of violence simply because you loved him." I hated him for saying it, and I hated him more because some small, treacherous corner of me wondered if he was right. My father had been a powerful man. People lowered their voices when they spoke his name. But the same hands had lifted me onto his shoulders when I was small, taught me to read, bought me my first piano, and promised that no one would ever hurt me while he lived. Then one rainy morning he had driven away and never come home. They found his car beside a river, and his body two days later. The police called it an accident. Adrian called it murder, and I had believed my brother. "You're lying," I said. "I have no reason to lie about a dead man." "You have every reason! This marriage ended a feud that threatened your empire. If you convince me my father killed yours, you can hold me with guilt for the rest of my life." Something flickered over his face. "Is that what you think this marriage is?" "I don't know what it is anymore!" I turned toward the window so he wouldn't see my eyes fill. For a year I had trained myself to be Dante Moretti's wife. I had memorised the names of his associates, learned which subjects to avoid at dinner, and smiled through gatherings where strangers studied me like a prize he had purchased. I had done everything that was expected, and now I was being told the foundation under it all was a lie. "Isabella," he said behind me. "Wanting something to be true does not make it true." I rounded on him. "And being a mafia king does not make you an expert in morality." "No," he said. "It makes me an expert in what people will do to survive." Before I could find an answer, his phone rang. He took the call without taking his eyes off me. "What?" A pause. "When?" His face darkened by degrees. "Keep him there. Do not let him leave." "What happened?" "Nothing you need to worry about." My laugh had no humour in it. "Naturally. My life is made entirely of things I'm not supposed to know." He ignored that. "I have to leave for a few minutes. Do not open this door for anyone but Marco or me." "I am your wife, not your prisoner." "Tonight the distinction does not matter." He reached the door, and I heard myself say his name. I hated the question already forming in my mouth, and asked it anyway. "Did you ever love me?" His shoulders went rigid. The silence stretched until I could hear the clock somewhere down the hall. When he finally looked back, his face was carefully empty. "I married you because I believed it was necessary." "That is not what I asked." "It is the only answer I can give you tonight." The door shut behind him, and I stood in the middle of the room feeling like the most foolish woman alive. I had fallen in love with a man who could not even tell me whether his feelings were real. I called Adrian twenty minutes later. He answered on the second ring, and the sound of his voice nearly undid me. "Isabella? What's wrong?" "Someone tried to kill me." There was a pause, and when he spoke again his voice had hardened. "Where is Dante?" "Somewhere in the house." "Listen to me. Do not trust him." "Adrian, he says Father was involved in the murder of his father." Silence again, and this one went on far too long. "Your husband will say anything to make you doubt yourself." "That isn't an answer. Did you meet Dante's father before Father died?" What came back down the line was a different kind of quiet, heavier and more careful. "Who told you that?" "That isn't an answer either." "I have to go." "Adrian, wait!" The line went dead. My brother had always been protective, sometimes unreasonably so, but in twenty-six years he had never once hung up on me. I stood at the window and watched armed men crossing the courtyard, their weapons printed against their jackets like shadows. I could not leave the house. But I might be able to leave the lie. If Dante truly had been investigating my father, the evidence would be somewhere in his study, and I waited until the corridor went quiet before I slipped out. The guard who had stood at my door was gone, and that should have stopped me. It didn't. The study door was unlocked, the room still smelling of leather and whiskey and faintly, awfully, of blood. I found only contracts and ledgers in the desk until I tried the bottom drawer, where a black folder lay waiting with my name written across it. Inside were photographs of me. I was leaving a restaurant, standing at my father's grave, outside the house I grew up in. Someone had been watching me for months. Behind them lay a copy of our marriage certificate, and across the corner, in Dante's handwriting, one sentence: SHE MUST NEVER DISCOVER WHAT HER FATHER HID. "Looking for something, wife?" He stood in the doorway, and his eyes went to the folder and then to me, and for the first time I saw real anger there. "Put it down, Isabella." I should have obeyed. Instead I turned over the last page in the folder, and the room tilted. It was a photograph of my father standing beside Dante's father, both men alive, both men smiling. Between them, in a white dress, with a silver bracelet at her wrist, stood a little girl. Me.