Page 3

Not his. A woman's.

Daniel comes around the corner first. Daniel, who once watched me rewire a dead man's jaw while finishing a sandwich, looks rattled. Far from bored this time. Behind him, two of my men are trying to hold on to a woman, and they're losing.

"—your hands off me— Let him go. Let my brother go!"

She comes around the hedge fighting, one man on each arm, and everything in my head—the powder from earlier, the crooked track in the grass, the sauce spot on the cloth I've been not looking at since the second course—goes quiet.

I suddenly feel as if I'm back in the mortuary, filled with the stillness of death.

But only for a moment.

She's wearing scrubs and trainers. Dark green, creased from a long shift, a hospital badge clipped to her waistband and flipped the wrong way round. Hair shoved into a tie that gave up likely hours ago. There's a coffee stain the size of a thumbprint on her sleeve, fury all over her face, and she is, without question or competition, the most alive and beautiful thing that has ever stood in this garden.

I'm on my feet. My chair goes over behind me and I leave it where it falls.

"Take your hands off her!” I bark at my men. This comes out low and fast and wrong, almost like a growl. The men let go of her instantly, as if she's caught fire. Constantine looks at me, but I ignore him because I’m already in awe. Possibly in love…

Only not possibly.

Daniel clears his throat. "Sir. The Valmont daughter. She came through the gate before we could⁠—"

Manon.

I pick up my wine and say nothing.

She doesn't look at me or any of the others. She crosses the terrace like she owns the deed to the house and drops to her knees in the gravel beside her brother. Her hands are already working—tilting his chin, thumbing an eyelid up, two fingers pressed under his jaw. She pulls the napkin out of his mouth and throws it on my lawn.

I watch it land crooked on the grass, and feel nothing at all.

Interesting.

"Manon—" her brother croaks. "You can't be here. Go home. Go⁠—"

"Shut up," she says gently, while she checks the split in his brow with her thumb.

Then she stands, wipes his blood down the front of her scrubs like it's nothing new, and turns around to face a garden full of armed men and one mafia family mid-dinner.

"Which one of you is Novak?"

Everyone at my table very helpfully looks at me. So much for suspense.

"That would be me," I say, stepping around the table.

"Let my brother go."

"Good evening to you, too." I gesture at the food. "Have you eaten? You look like you came straight off a shift."

"I'm not hungry, and you're not funny."

I'm extremely funny. Everyone on my payroll agrees.

"Your brother," I say, "walked into my club, picked a fight with my cousin, and stabbed him four times. Nicko is in surgery right now. He might live. He might not. Either way, your brother did it on my turf, in front of a few dozen of my people and allies." I stop an arm's length from her. "You grew up in the same world I did. Tell me what the rules say should happen next."

Her chin comes up. The pulse in her throat is going hard but her voice comes out flat and level.

"I know what the rules say."

Wrong answer. The right answer, the one I've heard a hundred times in a hundred rooms, is please. People beg here. They cry, they find religion at remarkable speed, they offer me their houses and their savings and their sad little souls. She stands on my terrace, with her brother's blood drying on her scrubs, and tells me she knows the rules.