Chapter 2: House Rules

They gave me eleven minutes to pack nineteen years. The car ride to Damien's estate takes forty minutes and nobody speaks. I count streetlights. I count exits. I count every reason I have to run and every reason I can't — my grandmother's care home costs four thousand a month, and Nico controls that account now. That's the leash. That's the whole leash. The house is worse than the mansion. It's beautiful the way a locked museum is beautiful. Glass and stone and a staircase like something out of a fairy tale where the girl doesn't survive. A woman in a black uniform takes my bag and looks at me with open disgust. "Third door," she says. "Don't touch anything." By morning I've learned the rules, and nobody had to say them out loud. The staff don't speak to me. The kitchen isn't mine — I ask for coffee and the cook turns her back. I sit at the dining table and my plate is removed before I've finished. Two of Damien's men play cards in the hall outside my door all night, laughing loud enough that I don't sleep. They're not guarding me. They're wearing me down. They want me to break and beg to leave, so they can say she chose to go. I know this game. I grew up on the wrong side of a school district. I've been the new girl in nine towns. You never let them see you cry. Ever. At seven a.m. Damien slides a piece of paper under my door. HOUSE RULES. Ten of them. Handwritten. Number four: You do not leave the property without me. Number seven: You answer when I call. Number nine: You call me by my name, not "sir," not "Mr. Rossi." I'm not your boss. I'm your fiancé. Number ten: Break any of these and your grandmother's account closes. I take the paper down to the kitchen where he's drinking espresso in a black T-shirt like a normal human being and not the man who bought me. I hold it up. Then I tear it into confetti and drop it in his coffee. The cook stops breathing. One of his men reaches for his belt. Damien looks at the cup. Then at me. Slowly, he sets it down. "You've got one minute," he says. "Speak." "I'm not a dog," I tell him. "I'll live in your house because I don't have a choice. I'll wear your ring because I don't have a choice. But my grandmother is eighty-one years old and she doesn't know what year it is, and if you ever use her against me again, I will find every reporter in this city and tell them exactly what the Rossi family does with teenage girls." The kitchen goes so silent I hear the fridge hum. Then Damien Rossi does something I don't expect. He laughs. Not the cruel one from last night. A real one, short and surprised, like it got out before he could stop it. "Your father was a coward," he says. "You're not." "Don't talk about my father." "He ran, Ava. He left you standing in the road when the truck came." He stands, and he's too tall, and the kitchen is suddenly too small. "I don't respect much. I respect that you're still standing." I hate that my heart trips. I hate it. He walks past me. Stops at the doorway. "Nine a.m.," he says. "Dining room. My uncle is coming to look at you, and if you don't survive lunch, none of this matters." I spend the next two hours going through the house because I refuse to sit and shake. Third floor. A study, unlocked, which should have told me something. Cigar smell. Photographs on the wall — the Rossi family through decades, weddings, baptisms, men with hard eyes and beautiful wives. And on the desk, in a silver frame, a photo from maybe fifteen years ago. Four men on a dock, laughing, sunburned, holding beers. I recognize Salvatore Rossi from the news. I recognize a young Luca and a boy who must be Damien, maybe nine years old, gap-toothed and grinning. And I recognize the fourth man, the one with his arm slung around Salvatore's shoulders like a brother. My father. Not a thief. Not a stranger they hunted down. A friend. Behind me, the study door clicks shut. "You weren't supposed to see that," Damien says.