The Crown Had My Name, But His Hands Held It

The tire iron came down first, then the fists, then anything a hand could close around. They struck the windows, the headlights, the hood. Nothing was spared.

"Bianca is going to be the wife of the next Boss of the Castellano Family!" someone bellowed from the press of bodies. "We can't let her be disrespected by gutter trash like Adriana!"

The words were a match to dry kindling. Suddenly every one of them was grabbing at whatever they could find, a bottle, a heel, a length of decorative railing torn loose from the garden, all of it turned into a weapon against the machine. They battered the glass until it webbed and caved. Then they climbed inside, this pack of pedigreed animals in silk and pressed linen, tearing at the leather seats, gouging the interior, gutting the thing from the inside out.

My car, pristine an hour ago, was reduced to a heap of wreckage in the length of a few breaths.

I watched these lunatics with a cold, unblinking calm, the kind of stillness that runs in my blood whether I want it or not. "I hope," I said, my voice carrying flat over the noise, "that when the day comes for you to pay for this, you'll be just as eager to answer for it."

But the words landed on no one. They moved around me as though I were a ghost, as though I were already gone, already nothing.

Then one of Bianca's little hangers-on wrenched the trunk open and crowed like he'd struck a vein of gold. "Hey! Look at this! She's got a whole stash of fancy stuff hidden back here!"

Bianca drifted closer, that practiced glide of hers, and drew out a canvas wrapped in protective cloth. She unveiled it with the smirk of a woman certain of her own untouchability. "A cheap little whore who earns her keep on her back, playing at being a collector? Spare me."

I gave her the only warning I intended to give. "Those pieces are worth more than the car. Especially that one. I'd choose your next move very carefully."

The trunk held acquisitions I'd taken quietly at auction, prizes I hadn't yet decided where to hang. Bianca didn't know what she was holding. She never did know the weight of the things she reached for. My warning only fed the fire behind her eyes.

"It's an obscenity," she spat, "that something like you should ever touch a masterpiece." She touched her wedding ring then, a small reflexive turn of the band on her finger, and lifted her chin the way she always did when she felt herself challenged. "You're trash. You deserve to own nothing but trash."

She tore the painting apart in front of me, ripping the canvas along its grain, then flung the ruined pieces to the marble and ground them under her heel with a vicious little joy that curled her painted mouth.

Rosa, hovering at the edge, bent to squint at the shredded thing and let out a strangled gasp. Before she said a word she glanced first at Bianca, checking the wind, deciding which way loyalty was blowing. "That's a master's original," she breathed. "I heard it opened at three hundred million at auction."

Bianca only shrugged, brazen, weightless. "So what if it's three hundred million? It's my husband's money all the same." She tilted her chin higher. "And what's his is mine. I can do whatever I please with what's mine."

The sheer absurdity of it stole the reply from my tongue.

Because Vince Marchetti was no Boss. He was no made man of standing, no tycoon born to the seat. He was a nobody from the outer wards who had married into a bloodline he could never truly enter, and who paraded himself in borrowed authority he had never earned. Even with the reins of the Castellano Syndicate resting loosely in his soft hands, his ineptitude had bled the empire of nearly half its worth. Were it not for the ring on his finger and the name he'd married into, I would have cut him loose long ago and never thought of him again.

Yet Bianca and these old associates from the same ward looked at him and saw a lion. They hung on his every word, worshipped him as an untouchable Boss, and destroyed my property in his honor.

With Bianca leading them, the rest fell in like hounds to a horn. They tore into the rest of the trunk, shredding, snapping, smashing every last thing with a hunger that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with proving themselves to her.

Watching the frenzy of it, I understood there was nothing left to save here. Not the car. Not the collection. Not their sense.

So I drew my phone from my coat, quietly, and let my thumb move toward the screen. There were people I could call. Friends in the right places. Men who would arrive without sirens and settle this in the language these fools had never learned to read.

I never finished the motion.

Bianca lunged, faster than her manicure and her heels suggested, and snatched the phone straight from my hand. She hurled it to the marble with everything she had, and the screen burst into a spider's map of ruin under her stamping foot.

"Calling for help, are you?" Her voice climbed, shrill with triumph. "You shameless little mistress. What right do you think you have?"

Then her gaze snagged on the pendant at my throat, and something greedy woke behind her eyes.

"That necklace looks expensive." A slow, ugly smile. "Did you buy that with my husband's money too?"

Before I could draw a breath, she seized it and ripped it from my neck with brutal, tearing force, the chain biting my skin as it broke.

My hand flew up to the bare hollow where it had always rested, closing on nothing, and the whole clamorous garden seemed to tilt and go silent around me.

"Give it back," I said, and this time there was no calm left in it at all. "Give it back."