Chapter 2 (Sera)

The collision is solid. I bounce off a wall of dark fabric and stumble back and every thought I was holding dissolves instantly in the shock of it.

"Scotland," I say. The last word my brain was processing, exiting before I can stop it.

"Move."

The voice is deep. Accented in a way I cannot immediately identify, and the temperature of it is about as warm as a January pavement. It cuts through the tequila fog in a way very little has managed tonight and I look up.

The man in front of me is extraordinarily handsome. Dark hair pushed slightly back. Olive skin. Eyes murky and green in the low street light, framed by bone structure that looks carved rather than born. He also radiates the specific energy of someone genuinely dangerous. Not performed danger. The real, quiet, cold kind that belongs to someone who has never once needed to prove it.

He is looking down at me the way you look at something that has attached itself to your shoe. Clear irritation, very little patience, and the expectation that I will immediately remove myself from his path.

Two men stand slightly behind him. Same dark hair, same olive skin, same green eyes. Brothers, obviously. One appears younger, his jaw looser with impatience. The other is harder to read.

"I'm sorry," I say, because I did walk into him and that is objectively my fault, "but also, are you Scottish? Because of the accent? I genuinely need to talk to someone about Prada."

The younger brother says something in Italian, low and aimed at the others. Fast and dismissive. But I catch the word inside it. Cagna. I know that word. It lives in the same family as words I grew up hearing in Greek.

I turn my eyes to him immediately. "Excuse me?"

He blinks. He was not expecting that.

I take in the geography of the situation. Lamppost on one side of the pavement, an adult store entrance on the other, a row of parked cars blocking the road. No way around me. The whole thing is lowkey my fault for standing in the only available path, but I am also wasted and it is my birthday and these men have so far called me a bitch in Italian and told me to move like I am an inconvenience placed here to ruin their evening.

"It's my birthday," I say, which feels important to establish. I look at the younger brother and take one step toward him, the kind of step a significantly larger creature would not bother with. "And yes, I'm drunk. I'm allowed to be."

The tallest one speaks again. His accent is thick, his words blurring at the edges through the tequila fog, and I think he is asking for something. Money, maybe. I reach instinctively toward the side of my dress where I keep a folded hundred dollar bill when I go out, because one should always have exit money, and I start trying to retrieve it.

He moves faster than I track it. His hand closes around my wrist and stops me, and I feel the cool metal of his rings against my skin before he releases me, and the contact is like pressing your hand briefly against something electrified. Quick and startling and gone, leaving a warmth I am going to attribute entirely to surprise and to nothing else whatsoever.

Then he looks at me with those murky green eyes and says one word.

"Putána."

I know that word. It exists in Greek with slightly different letters and the exact same meaning, and no one in twenty-five years of living among some of the most volatile men on the eastern seaboard has ever directed it at me.

The gasp that comes out of me is genuine. Not performed, not exaggerated. The real involuntary sound of someone actually stunned. This is my ick. Of every possible thing a man could do, this is it, standing there with that cold look and that single ugly word and the total absence of any feeling behind it.

The younger brother shoves me. Not a brush. A deliberate shove with enough force that I go sideways, and I would have gone all the way down if there were not suddenly hands behind me.

Amara.

She catches me with both hands and steadies me. "Hey. Are you okay?"

I am gathering myself. When I look up, the tall man has already turned and is walking away, like the interaction is beneath him, like I am so far beneath notice that he cannot be bothered to observe what his brother just did.

The two brothers remain. The one with the Scottish-ish accent looks at me with something between dismissal and curiosity.

I address him before he can speak.

"A simple polite request to move," I say, and my voice is steady in a way I am proud of, "would have been enough. That is all it would have taken. Instead you nearly knocked me down twice and used the worst possible language toward a stranger who has done nothing to you except exist inconveniently in your path. That is shady, it is toxic, and frankly, it is the behaviour of a complete asshole."

He opens his mouth.

"Maláka," I say, looking at him with every gram of composure I can locate. "Your mother must be very proud of all three of you."

The moment the word mother leaves my mouth, I know I have struck something I did not fully understand I was swinging toward. The change in him is immediate and total. His hands ball into fists. A vein appears along his neck. His jaw locks until the shape of it is visible in the low light. His hand moves toward his left side, beneath his jacket, and he takes one step forward that contains within it the full intention of several more.

I have grown up in the Sorano Syndicate. I have been in rooms where threats were being made since I was young enough to understand the weight of a silence. The look on this man's face right now is the single most genuinely deadly thing I have ever been on the receiving end of. No cap. He is not going off the way someone does when they are simply angry. This is something colder.

His other brother grabs him. Both hands, firm and immediate, shoves him physically forward and away from me, speaking fast and low in Italian into his ear. "Basta. Andiamo."

They move. Both spare me one final look over their shoulders, the kind that lands like a door being closed very deliberately, and then they disappear through the entrance of an Italian restaurant further down the street.

Amara takes my hands.

"Hey." Her voice is low and warm. "Look at me. Don't let them ruin tonight. They are not worth a single second of it."

Something behind my eyes burns, and before I can stop it, one tear tracks hot down my cheek.

I wipe it away immediately. Hard, with the back of my wrist, like removing an insult from my own face. The fury that floods in behind it is so much cleaner and more useful than the hurt was. I lock the hurt away and let the fury be what I carry back inside. Those men are going to be living rent free in my head for the foreseeable future and I resent them for it completely.

"Don't tell Leander," I say. "Don't tell Caspian. Not a word."

Amara meets my eyes steadily. "I promise."

We go back inside. We order shots.