After Death, I Chose The Mafia Don

Blair woke up gasping, and for three full seconds she didn't understand why she was still breathing.

Her hands went to her throat before her mind caught up with them, checking for bruises that weren't there.

Her body remembered a locked door, air rationed too thin to call air. Her eyes disagreed. Sunlight. A water stain shaped like Sicily on the ceiling above her bed. Curtains she'd picked out at sixteen, in a room that had stopped being hers years ago and apparently hadn't heard about it.

"Blair!" Her mother's voice came sailing up the stairs, bright and utterly unaware that her daughter had just come back from somewhere she shouldn't have been able to leave. "Wake up, birthday girl — you've got exactly eleven hours left of being seventeen, and I need help with these flowers before your father ruins them trying to help!"

"Coming," Blair called back, and her voice only cracked a little.

She got up on legs that didn't shake the way she'd expected, crossed to the mirror, and pulled her shirt up at the hip with fingers that weren't quite steady.

No ink. No crimson wings inked into the skin above her hip — the ones she wouldn't get for another two years, in a life that hadn't happened yet.

Bare skin. Untouched. Exactly the way it should be.

She was still staring at it when her mother's voice came again, closer this time, from the bottom of the stairs. "Blair, I can hear you not moving!"

"I'm coming, I'm coming."

Downstairs, Fiorella was losing a war against too many peonies and a vase that clearly wasn't going to hold them all. Her father sat behind his newspaper at the kitchen table, reading glasses low on his nose, exactly as alive and exactly as unbothered as Blair remembered him being, once, a long time from now.

"There she is." He lowered the paper just enough to look at her over it. "Eighteen years old today. God help the rest of us."

"Don't jinx it," Blair said, and busied herself with the coffee pot so he wouldn't see what the joke cost her.

"Sit, sit. Eat something before your mother puts you to work." He turned a page without looking up. "You're paler than usual. Bad dreams?"

"Something like that."

"Mm. Eighteen's a hard birthday. Everyone expects you to suddenly know things." He said it like a joke. It landed somewhere else entirely.

"Stefano, tell your daughter she's not allowed to look that tragic on her own birthday," Fiorella called from the counter, not turning around.

"She's allowed to look however she wants," he said mildly. "Big days make people strange."

Blair sat down across from him with a coffee she hadn't asked for and had been given anyway.

"I still need the final headcount for tonight." Fiorella set down her scissors and started counting names off on her fingers. "Your cousins, obviously. The Renaldis. Did Andrew ever confirm?"

Blair's hand went still around her cup. "I don't know."

"Of course he confirmed." Her father said it without looking up, the way you'd state a fact about the weather. "Good boy, that one. Never misses your birthday."

"Right," Blair said, and something in her chest pulled tight enough to hurt.

Her phone buzzed against the table before she could think of anything else to say.

Andrew.

Happy birthday. Save me a dance tonight?

Six words. That was all it had ever taken.

"Who's that?" Fiorella asked, already reaching for another length of ribbon, only half listening.

"No one," Blair said, and set the phone face-down without answering it.

Her mother swept back through a few minutes later with an armful of ribbon and stopped in the doorway, wearing the particular look Blair had already learned, in the space of one morning, to dread.

"Oh — before I forget." Fiorella said it lightly, like it cost nothing. "Andrew's here."

Blair's coffee stopped halfway to her mouth. "He's here?"

"Downstairs, in the courtyard. Came early." Her mother was already turning back toward the flowers, entirely too pleased about it. "Said he wanted a few minutes with you before everyone else arrives."

"Go on, then." Her father waved a hand at her without lowering the paper, amused. "Don't keep the boy waiting on your birthday."

Fiorella was humming again by the time Blair pushed her chair back.

She sat very still for one more second first, and somewhere under her ribs, seven years of promises made in a locked, airless dark started quietly, inevitably, coming due.