Page 17 of The Marriage Debt

I study the photos for another few seconds before I speak again.

The hit was cleaner than I expected. Fast, quiet, no unnecessary attention. It shouldn’t have been that smooth—not with a target already spooked and looking for a way in. Whoever pulled the trigger didn’t flinch. That works in our favor.

I set the folder down and lean back in the chair. “Is it clean?”

Alessio nods once. “Unregistered weapon. Burner car. No traffic cameras nearby. We swept the inside for trace—gloves used, no prints. Local cleanup crew handled the scene and paid off the fuel clerk.”

I nod, satisfied. “Good. Keep it buried. Make sure his name disappears by morning. I don’t want it circulating.”

“I’ll lock it down tonight,” he says. “Rafe’s pulling the remaining digital trail from our side. Message ping to Lila’s account is already deleted.”

“Scrub anything connected to the burner he used. I don’t want it leading back to this house.”

Alessio rises from the chair. “Consider it gone.” He leaves without asking if I need anything else.

I stay seated another minute, watching the edge of the folder as the light from the window slides across it. D’Amico made his choice when he sent that message. He gambled on desperation. He lost.

I get up and head toward the dining room. Lev is already in the middle of a story when I walk in—something about a school project and how glue sticks are better than tape, but not if you’re building a castle. He talks with his hands. His fork is on the table, untouched.

Lila sits across from him, elbows off the table, hands folded neatly in her lap. She doesn’t look at me when I sit down. Neither of them pauses. Lev keeps going like I’ve been there the whole time.

My plate is already waiting. Still warm. I cut into the chicken as Lev explains how the drawbridge fell off three times but he fixed it with a pencil and a shoelace. Lila listens. She smiles a little, only at him.

Dinner stretches longer than usual. Lev eats slowly, distracted by his own story. Lila barely touches her food. Her wine glass is full. Mine stays empty.

When Lev finally gets up from the table, he presses a kiss to her cheek, waves at me, and bolts toward the hallway, muttering something about finishing a drawing.

Lila is quiet for a moment, chewing carefully, and when she dabs her lips with her napkin, I know she's going to speak. Regretfully, what she says isn't what I expect.

"Will I see any of Anton's money? Or is that all yours too?" She doesn’t look at me when she speaks. I scowl at the idea that she cares more about the money than anything else.

"It's gone," I say plainly, taking another bite of chicken. I know he has more stashed somewhere, but the Bianchis probably know better than I do where it is. I'm not concerned about that, though it seems to be their primary concern.

Lila stands, dropping her napkin on the table, and walks out without saying a word. I sense she's planning something and I don't like that.

Men like my brother are easy to understand. They make plans in the open, involve others. But Lila is secretive and quiet, stewing inside her own mind. Dangerous. I can't trust her.

But I don't have to. I just have to watch her. And that's what I'm going to do.

9

LILA

Ispend most of the day dodging Mateo. If I hear his voice at the end of a hall, I change direction. If I catch a glimpse of his shadow near the study, I retreat before he sees me. I avoid the main staircase. I listen at corners. The house is big enough to make it possible, but not easy. His presence moves through this place like current through a wire—quiet, constant, always there, whether I see him or not.

Nothing changed in this house since he fucked me on the terrace, but something most certainly changed inside me. I liked it—a little too much. It's what got me into trouble with Anton. Marcella told me when I started dating him that I had daddy issues, that my fascination with being smacked around and choked during sex was a manifestation of my inner need for discipline. I laughed her off, told her it was some bullshit my mother told her to say, but now I wonder if she's right.

My throat tingles at the idea of Mateo's fingers being wrapped around it.

Lev stays in the sitting room with a box of string and paper and decides he’s building traps. He explains them in detail while I sit beside him and pretend to follow the blueprints he’s drawing on the back of an old menu. There’s a spike pit in the laundry room, a secret panel behind the kitchen door, and a fake wall in the hallway leading to my room. All of it is designed to keep "the bad guys" out. I don’t ask why. I just nod along and tear strips of paper when he asks me to.

I hate that my own son lives like me—on edge, flighty, anxious. He may never have had a hand laid on him the way I have, but he definitely knows what it's like to feel fear. Anton saw to that. Lev lives in fear just like me, and now he looks at Mateo like a god—worships him. And I hate it. How can Mateo be allowed to put that feeling of safety in my boy's heart and not me?

When he loses interest and drifts toward the piano in the front room, I take my chance. My coat is still in the second-floor closet, untouched since the wedding. I bring it into the bathroom and lock the door. The burner phone is stitched into the lining, inside a pocket I made before Anton’s funeral. I rip the seam with a pair of tweezers, put the battery into it, and sit on the floor with the faucet running just loud enough to muffle the sound of the chime as it powers up.

Marcella answers on the second ring. She doesn’t say hello.

“You shouldn’t be calling me on this line.”

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