That stupid birthday dare was supposed to humiliate the poorest woman at the table

The screen of the encrypted titanium device glowed with a cold, blue-white luminescence in the shadowed alcove of the VIP booth.

The image was uncompressed, razor-sharp, taken with an eighty-five-millimeter optical lens from an elevated vantage across Wacker Drive.

The man sitting in the leather banquette of a private members' club on the sixty-seventh floor of the Willis Tower was Arthur Vance.

Arthur Vance—the senior managing partner of Vance, Sterling & Croft Accounting LLP, the boutique firm where I spent nine hours every weekday verifying accounts payable registers, logging municipal transit vouchers, and earning twenty-four dollars and fifty cents an hour. He was sixty-two years old, with thin, silvered hair combed flat over a mottled scalp, wearing his signature three-piece navy pinstripe suit, his fingers steepled over a crystal lowball of twenty-year-old single malt.

And sitting across from him, leaning over an unsealed manila document portfolio bound with red cotton ribbon, was Samantha Cole.

She was not wearing the oversized streetwear or the theatrical, feigned-casual posture she used when she belittled my thrifted skirts at Sunday brunch.

She wore an ivory wool coat from Celine, her manicure pristine, her lips parted in an intense, predatory focus as she pointed a manicured crimson fingernail directly at a signature line on the document between them.

The date stamp in the lower-right corner of the high-resolution frame read: TODAY — 17:42:19.

Less than four hours ago.

"Arthur Vance does not invest in boutique soy candles, Clarissa," Luca DeLuca said.

His voice was a low, velvet-sheathed gravel that vibrated against the bare skin of my upper arm. His thumb, broad and calloused across the knuckle, remained pressed firmly against the small of my back, right where the cheap zipper of my altered sapphire dress met the curve of my spine. The heat of his hand burned through the thin synthetic fabric like a flatiron.

"I... I file his travel receipts," I whispered. My throat felt as though it had been coated with pulverized chalk. The electronic bass from the dance floor fifty feet away thudded through the velvet curtain, but inside the private booth, the sound felt muffled, distant, submerged under three feet of black water. "Mr. Vance doesn't even know my last name. He calls me 'the girl at the front.' When his personal secretary went on maternity leave in August, I organized his physical archives in the sub-basement. That’s all."

"He knows your last name, little bird," Luca murmured, turning his head slightly toward the two armed sentries standing at the edge of the velvet rope.

The taller of the two—a man whose neck was thick as a railroad tie, wearing a tailored charcoal suit that hid an unholstered Glock 19 beneath his left armpit—stepped forward. His name was Dante. I knew that because Luca had muttered it under his breath when the music first dipped.

"Clear the lane behind the service bar, Dante," Luca commanded. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't look at the dance floor where eighty people were still frozen, holding their champagne flutes like wax figures, staring at the back of my dress. "Tell the valet to bring the armored S-Class to the alley entrance on Court Place. If the Cole girl attempts to leave through the front revolving doors, detain her driver. Quietly."

"Yes, Don Luca," Dante answered. He gave a single, curt nod, touched the acoustic coil in his right ear, and melted into the gloom of the corridor with the soundless economy of an executioner.

I tried to pull back.

Just an inch. Just enough to put air between my ribs and the crisp, iron-scented wool of his lapel.

Luca’s grip did not yield. His arm tightened by a fraction of a millimeter—not painful, but an absolute, unyielding vise of pure bone and tendon that reminded me that the man holding me was thirty-four years old, commanded forty-five square blocks of commercial real estate from the Chicago River down to the Calumet slip, and had buried four rival caporegimes before his thirty-first birthday.

"Don't pull away, Clarissa," Luca said softly, his dark eyes dropping to my mouth for a single, devastating fraction of a second before lifting to meet my gaze. "Your friend Samantha is watching from Table Four. She has her phone raised to her ear. If she sees daylight between us, she knows the play has failed. And if she knows the play has failed, the men she left outside your apartment on Twenty-Second Street will not wait for the signal."

The air left my lungs in a sharp, jagged gasp that tasted like acid.

"My apartment?" I choked out. "There are men at my apartment?"

"Two runners from the North Side syndicate," Luca said, his fingers gently tracing the side of my ribcage, his thumb resting right beneath my heart, measuring the frantic, bird-like flutter of my pulse against my chest wall.

"They arrived twenty minutes before you stepped into the cab with Samantha. They entered the basement through the laundry chute. They aren't looking for your thrift-store coats, Clarissa. They are looking for the four blue-bound ledger notebooks your mother took from the municipal archives before she went into the oncology ward at Northwestern three years ago."

My vision tunnelled. The glittering crystal sconces of The Violet Tower turned into long, bleeding streaks of white gold against the dark.

My mother.

Margaret Robinson.

A thirty-year clerk in the Cook County Recorder of Deeds office. A quiet, exhausted woman who had died with eighty-two dollars in her checking account and four boxes of old property tax books stacked beneath her hospital bed. Books she had made me swear on a wooden crucifix never to open, never to sell, and never to show to anyone whose name appeared on the letterhead of Vance, Sterling & Croft.

"How do you know about the notebooks?" I whispered, my fingers clenching into the coarse wool of his overcoat.

Luca DeLuca looked down at me, his sculpted, scarred jaw tightening into a line of absolute, terrifying certainty.

"Because twelve years ago, Clarissa," Luca whispered into my ear, "the man who ordered the hit on my father in the alley behind the Fulton Market was Arthur Vance. And the only person in this city who held the certified land deeds that proved he paid the shooters with municipal port authority bonds... was your mother."

He turned me in his arms, his hand sliding up to cup the nape of my neck, his fingers tangling in the dark curls of my hair, shielding my face from the club with his broad shoulders.