Chapter 4

I went to the study. He stood at the window with his back to me, an unlit cigar held between his fingers.

"Emilia," he said, his voice flat, "last October, a shipment of mine got intercepted in Detroit. I chased it for three weeks and only ever traced it back to a leak from the inside."

"This January, a deal I had with the East Coast got snatched out from under me three days early. It was like they'd walked in holding my cards, undercutting me by exactly ten percent."

He turned, spun the papers on the desk around, and pushed them toward me. There were email screenshots, transfer records, and a chat log from a messaging app. The avatars of both parties had been blacked out, but the sender's IP address was circled.

I took one look. It was the fixed IP of my own laptop.

"This is—"

"And the eighteenth, our anniversary! My warehouse in Miami got raided. The federal agents showed up at exactly the right moment, like they'd timed it to the second."

Anger simmered in Leon's eyes, on the verge of erupting. "And the source of the leak we traced? Your device again."

He looked at me and fell silent for a few seconds.

"Emilia. I'm waiting for you to explain."

I picked up the papers and read through them one by one. Every piece of "evidence" had been forged with terrifying precision.

"This is impossible. My device must have been hacked, or this was faked..."

Leon let out a short laugh. He came around the desk to stand in front of me and looked down at me.

"Do you have any idea how long I spent making excuses for you when Cecilia told me all this this morning?" His voice began to crack. "I said it was impossible. I staked my whole reputation on you, swore it couldn't be true. And then today I ran every lead three times. Three times, Emilia, and every one of them points to you."

"I still couldn't be sure. But you tell me, where were you on our anniversary?"

"I waited for you all night at the cabin on the mountain..."

"Do you have any proof?"

I froze, because I'd gone alone to surprise Leon and hadn't told a soul.

"No," I said softly. "But I've been at your side for three years. You'd believe those charges against me."

Leon straightened and took a step back, looking at me the way you'd look at a stranger.

My mind raced, and it came to me: it had to be Cecilia. She was the eldest daughter of the Rosse family, with far greater access to intelligence than I had.

My old accounts, my father had held onto them for a while under the pretext of "managing the assets." If she wanted, she could get her hands on anything.

But I had no proof. Cecilia was far too good at this sort of thing. She'd fabricated a perfect spy story around me and left me with no way to defend myself.

"One more thing. Cecilia is pregnant."

I thought of her stomach pain that day and said flatly, "Congratulations."

"Let's get divorced. There's no room at my side for a traitor."

He pulled out a folder. Inside were the divorce papers.

"You can keep the house in San Francisco. I'll settle the rest of the assets and wire them to your account. As for you claiming the life debt I owed Cecilia as your own, I won't hold it against you. Let's part on good terms."

"Hahaha... Leon, you think this is what I wanted?"

"Then what did you want?" He raised his eyes to me, undisguised irritation on his face. "When you married me, your father gave you nothing. For three years everything you ate and wore and used was mine. And you still betrayed me, sold Crimson Flame's intelligence for money?"

"I didn't." My voice started to shake. "Leon, give me some time. I'll get to the bottom of it. And what happened back when we were children..."

"Enough, Emilia. Cecilia's scar, the song she sang, that coin, every single detail lines up. She's the heir of the Rosse family. What would she need to lie to me for?"

"She would," I said. "Because you're the Don of Crimson Flame. Because you hold the most valuable underground channels in all of Chicago. Because you 'owe her your life,' and she'll make you hand over everything to pay it back, gladly."

Leon shot to his feet, the chair legs scraping across the floor with a shrill screech.

"Emilia," he said, his voice dropping low, "if you don't want to sign, just say so. There's no need to sling mud with all this made-up nonsense. If Cecilia hadn't gone abroad back then, do you really think I'd have chosen you, the Rosse family's disgraceful little bastard?"

Leon was furious, and the ferocity in his eyes looked ready to tear me apart alive. For the first time, he felt like a stranger to me.

"Remember to sign the papers. I won't wait long."

He threw out the words and turned to leave.

I slumped to the floor, drained. My dear sister, you really did prepare quite the gift for me.

My phone suddenly rang. It was an unknown Italian number.

I stared at the string of numbers for a long while. For some reason, my heart suddenly began to race.

I pressed answer, and an unfamiliar woman's voice came through, speaking a single line in the Sicilian dialect.

"You've suffered."

In an instant all the blood rushed to my head.

"...Who is this?"

The other end was silent for a long time, and then she sang a line, soft and brief. It was that Italian lullaby.

My hand clenched hard around the phone. This was the voice I'd heard every single night as a child.

"Emilia," she said, "Mama's come back."

"How did you... how did you get my number?"

"I've always known." She bore down hard on every word, as if holding something back. "These past few months, I've been watching. And that night up on the mountain... I know about all of it."

Every emotion in me broke loose at once.

"Mama... I want to leave. Help me."