Chapter 2

The lawyer didn't speak for a long time.

I sat in a windowless office on West Madison, watching her face change as she turned each page. Forty-seven pages of the Moretti prenuptial agreement—every clause a locked door I'd already memorized.

"Mrs. Moretti—"

"Montgomery." The correction left my mouth before I could catch it. "My name is Iris Montgomery."

She paused. Looked back down.

"Ms. Montgomery," she said carefully, "whoever drafted this didn't write a prenuptial agreement. They built a cage." Her jaw tightened with each page. "If the wife initiates divorce—full forfeiture. Total repayment. Plus a liquidated damages clause of—"

"Two point three million."

The pity in her eyes was worse than the number.

"Do you have two point three million dollars?"

"No."

"Then you can't leave. Not through a standard filing." She leaned forward, lowering her voice like even the walls might report back to someone. "And if what you're telling me is true—that you signed under a false identity at your father's coercion—that doesn't just complicate things. It exposes you. The Morettis don't settle in courtrooms, Ms. Montgomery. They settle in rooms no one talks about."

"How long would it take?"

"Their attorneys don't litigate. They bury people. Eighteen months. Minimum."

Eighteen months.

I paid the consultation fee in cash—bills I'd saved one at a time, skimming fives from grocery runs the way women married into this life learned to survive. Walked out into the gray Chicago afternoon and stood on the sidewalk until my hands stopped shaking.

Julian was waiting when I got back.

Not obviously—he was too careful for that. He sat in the east parlor with a book open on his knee, angled toward the front entrance. Marcus's younger brother. The family's sottocapo. Everyone called him the diplomat—the gentle Moretti, the one who smiled instead of striking.

In a family that killed with its hands, the one who killed with patience should have terrified them all.

He looked up with that easy warmth that made the household staff trust him. Made them careless.

"Iris." He never called me Vivienne when we were alone. "You look cold. Third floor still freezing?"

"I'm fine."

"You're not." He said it softly. Almost tenderly. The way you'd speak to something small before you picked it up. "You haven't been fine for three years, and every person in this house sees it, and not one of them has lifted a finger." He stood, smoothing his jacket. "That must make you feel very alone."

My throat tightened. That was Julian's weapon—not volume, not a gun pressed to bone. He said the exact thing you were starving to hear, in the exact voice you needed to hear it in. And he watched your face while he did it.

"Why do you care?" I asked.

His smile didn't change. But something behind it shifted—quick, precise, the way a card player checks his hand without moving his fingers.

"Because someone in this family should."

At dinner, Marcus sat at the head of the table. Silent. Still. The capo di tutti capi in his element—or his absence. His fork hadn't moved in ten minutes.

Then his phone buzzed against the mahogany.

He glanced at the screen.

I watched the color leave his face—not slowly. All at once. Like a faucet turning off.

He stood without a word. His napkin slid to the floor. He walked out, and the dining room door didn't fully close behind him.

Julian picked up his wine glass. Swirled it once. His pale gray eyes found mine over the rim.

"Some people," he said, "have terrible timing." A sip. A pause. "And some people are about to come home."

My stomach dropped. "What are you talking about?"

He just smiled. Patient. Unhurried. A man who had waited a very long time and didn't mind waiting a little longer.

I couldn't sleep.

At midnight I stood at the third-floor window—my window, the one luxury of exile. Below, in the garden, Marcus stood alone.

Phone pressed to his ear. The wind blew south, pushing sound upward, and I heard his voice before I could decide whether I wanted to.

"Vivienne." A breath. A crack in something that had never cracked before. "You're really coming back?"

His voice was shaking.

Not with anger.

Hope.

Marcus Moretti—the Don who hadn't spoken to me in three years, who walked past me like I was part of the wallpaper, who had touched me only once in the dark and only by mistake—was standing in his garden, trembling for her.

I pressed my palm flat against my stomach.

The glass was ice against my forehead.

Below me, he whispered something I couldn't hear. Then he laughed—low, broken, young. A sound I'd never once heard him make. The kind of sound that meant a man had kept a door locked inside himself, and someone had just turned the handle.

I stepped back from the window.

My hand stayed where it was.