Chapter 3: What My Mother Bought

My mother moved before the first shot. Not away. Into it. She threw herself into the mouth of the corridor — that stupid narrow servants' passage with one door and one exit — and spread her arms across it like she was a wall instead of a hundred and ten pounds of broken woman. "ELIAS!" she screamed. "TAKE HER!" "MOM—" "GO!" Elias's arm went around my waist and lifted me off the floor. I fought him. God, I fought him. I broke his nose with the back of my head and he still didn't let go, dragging me backward through the garden door while gunfire chewed the stone above us and my mother's voice went hoarse behind me. The last thing I saw was her silhouette in the doorway, arms out, holding twenty-four men in place with nothing but her body. Buying me eleven seconds. I have spent every day since trying to be worth eleven seconds. We ran for three hours through wet forest. Elias bled the whole way. We stole a car in Rockridge, abandoned it in Cross Falls, and slept in a drainage culvert with my wedding dress torn off at the knee. I didn't cry. I want to be honest about that, because everyone expects a girl to cry. I sat in the dark doing math. Dorian Kane. My father, Jonathan Ashcroft. Marissa. Adele. Don Ambrose. Killian Voss. Six names. I said them until they stopped hurting and started to feel like a to-do list. "They'll hunt us for months," Elias said. His voice was thin. "We need money and we need a border." "We need power," I said. He looked at me. "Ivy. We have forty dollars and a stolen phone." "Then we start there." Three weeks later, I killed a man for the first time. That's not how the story usually goes, is it? The girl learns kindness and patience. No. I learned that the border market outside Vance runs a cage line behind the fuel depot, and that girls from broken families go for four thousand in cash. She was maybe sixteen. Chain on her neck, dirt on her face, kneeling in the mud while a fat man in a good coat shouted numbers. "Four thousand! Four for a healthy one, gentlemen — cook, clean, warm your bed, whatever you like—" A buyer lifted her chin with two fingers. She turned her face away. He backhanded her so hard she went into the mud. Nobody moved. Sixty people. Nobody moved. "Ivy." Elias grabbed my arm. "We can't protect ourselves — don't—" I pulled free. "If they think they can sell us like livestock," I said, "then they picked the wrong day." I broke the buyer's jaw with a length of pipe. The trafficker came at me with a knife and I got it in my shoulder and I did not care, I got both hands in his hair and put his face through the side of a truck, and then his two guards came, and that was when I understood that rage is not a plan. The first one hit me so hard the world went white. The second one got a boot on my throat. And then the world came apart. I heard the car before I saw it — a black armored thing that came through the market at sixty, and men in dark coats stepping out of it like something falling out of the sky, and the two guards on top of me were simply gone, dragged backward, and the fat trafficker had time for exactly half a word before a bullet went through his forehead and dropped him in his own mud. Silence. The whole market on its knees. A man walked through it. Black coat, dark hair, a face that belonged on old coins — cold and beautiful and completely without mercy. On the back of his right hand, inked in black: a wolf. Everyone in that country knew that mark. Even I did. The Wolf. Nikolai Volkov. The man the five families paid tribute to. The man who made kings and buried them. He crouched in the mud in a twelve-thousand-dollar coat and looked at my bleeding face for a long moment. "You took on three men," he said. "Alone. For a girl you don't know." "Somebody had to." Something moved behind his eyes. It looked almost like hunger. He stood and held out his hand, palm up. "Come with me." I laughed. It hurt. "Why would I trust you?" "Because in nine days the Kane family will find you in this market and take you back in pieces." He said it like weather. "And because I've been looking for you since the night your blood went into the Kane Ledger." Everything in me went cold. "What?" "You want their empire," said Nikolai Volkov. "I can put it in your hands. But first you should sit down, Ivy." He tilted his head. "Because I know who your real father was. And when I tell you his name, every family in this country is going to have to kneel."