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Voices emerged from the stairwell, on a lower level than the one I stood on. Angry Russian shouts.

It wouldn’t take long, if calmer heads prevailed, for Afansay and Daniil to realize I had played them, so I didn’t hesitate.

I flew down the stairs.

My balance was thrown off with my hands secured behind my back, so I ran hard into the banister on my first sharp corner. I compensated quickly and made it down ten flights of stairs before I heard yelling higher up in the stairwell and knew Daniil and Afansay had noticed I was absent.

I ran harder, never more thankful for Akira’s brutal insistence on conditioning.

When I reached the bottom floor, the empty foyer was littered in broken glass and garbage, and something sharp sliced into my foot. I was almost across the space before I noticed Petyr in the shadows to one side of the door. He stepped forward slightly into a puddle of weak light, the shine of it bright against the gun in his hand.

We stared at each other, the prey and the hunter. I didn’t have to fake the desperation on my face, the begging in my gaze.

“I can be a very good friend,” I whispered through a thick throat. “Maybe, in the future, we can help each other.”

He blinked at me, his face white, pimples bright red, eyes dark as molasses.

“I don’t have to tell my husband you were involved,” I offered as an olive branch.

“The man Daniil spoke to about the ransom?” Petyr said so quietly I almost had to read his lips to get the information. “He wanted you alive and for himself, even if Dario paid one million. Not to kill, you see. To own. And . . . he spoke Italian.”

My heart stopped with a lurch in my chest as I wondered if the Italian-speaking man could be Lo Spettro, the same assassin who had killed my entire family in Palermo.

Was he trying to take out the last of the Cavallaros? And if so why, or why now?

Slowly, without taking his gaze from me, Petyr dropped the gun to his side and stepped into the shadows just as shouts drifted louder down the staircase at my back.

I didn’t hesitate to barrel out the front doors, my heart in my throat at having a Russian gunman behind me.

The first slap of cold November air was like a caress on my face, and I took one precious second to breathe deeply before I studied my surroundings. It was early morning, barely past dawn, and gray, the sky so pregnant with dark clouds the air seemed filled with the shadowy promise of a storm. The neighborhood we were in was something on the South Shore, but beyond that I had no idea, and the buildings around me were mostly closed up or unfinished construction that had been abandoned long ago.

I turned left down the street at a sprint because it seemed as good a direction as any.

It took three blocks before businesses appeared that were still open.

I decided to veer off the same street to the right and then turned left on the next block before I ducked into a diner called Saul’s that offered breakfast twenty-four seven, so that the Russians wouldn’t find me in the first place they looked.

The door tinkled with bells as I pushed it open and entered the welcome, maple syrup–scented warmth of the restaurant. There were only a handful of diners, but they all stopped talking when they took stock of me, barefoot and bruised with my hands bound, in the doorway.

“Hi,” I said, trying to catch my breath around what I hoped was a pleasant attempt at a smile as a hostess hesitantly approached me. “Can I get a coffee and a pair of scissors? And would you mind if I used your phone?”

Chapter Twelve

Fiammetta

Dario wasn’t the one to pick me up from Saul’s diner.

Instead, my favorite bodyguards Luigi and Stefan arrived, obviously armed to the teeth even though they tried to conceal it.

Instead of relief, I felt unaccountable fury.

My own husband, who had already refused to pay my ransom, couldn’t even come pick me up after I staged my own escape?

My blood boiled beneath my skin, a flush rising to the surface that made me look almost sunburned.

I had never been an angry person before marrying Dario and moving to America, but then again, I had never been independent or self-fulfilled either.

Rage felt . . . good.