My father sold me for eight million dollars. My stepmother smiled while she counted it. The buyer is a man they call the Devil of Chicago. He collects debts in blood. Tonight, I'm the payment. And I'm not allowed to scream. I'm on my knees in the snow outside our house, both hands wrapped around my father's shoe like a beggar. Ice soaks through my dress. I don't care. "Daddy, please." My voice cracks in half. "Please. I'll work. I'll do anything. Don't give me to him." He looks down at me the way you look at a bill you've already paid. "I owe Vitale eight million, Elena. He doesn't take checks. He takes what's precious." His jaw tightens. "This is what you're for." This is what you're for. Nineteen years of being his daughter, and that's the sentence he chooses. Behind him, my stepmother steps out of the door in white fur, her heels clicking on cleared stone. Isolde never gets snow on her shoes. Isolde never gets anything on her. "Get her up," she says softly. "She's making a scene." "Isolde—" I twist toward her. "You told me he'd forgive the debt. You promised—" She crouches down in front of me, so close I can smell her perfume, and her manicured hand closes around my jaw hard enough to bruise. "Listen to me, little rat," she whispers, sweet as sugar, so the guards can't hear. "You will get in that car. You will smile. And you will never, ever tell Damiano Vitale who sold you or what we did with the rest of that money." "Or what?" Her thumb presses into my cheek. "Or your sister goes missing on her way home from school. Rosie's what — twelve now?" She tilts her head. "Say one word, Elena. Test me." Everything inside me goes cold and quiet. Rosie, who still sleeps with the hall light on. Rosie, who cried into my hair last night and asked when I was coming back. I stop fighting. Isolde smiles and stands, brushing her hands off like she touched something dirty. "Poor thing," she says loudly, to no one. "She isn't mine, of course, but I've raised her like my own. What a cruel world." A guard hauls me up by the arm and walks me to the black car idling at the gate. He's young. He looks at my father, then at the leather case of money in Isolde's hands, and spits into the snow. "Sick bastards," he mutters. "Selling their own kid to Vitale for a payday." The door slams. The lock clicks. I press my palms to the tinted glass and watch the two people who raised me walk back inside, arm in arm, laughing about something. Neither of them looks back. The Vitale estate sits above the lake like a black knife. Two men in suits pull me out of the car, march me through doors twice my height, and shove me into a marble hall so cold my breath fogs. Then they leave. The doors boom shut behind me. "Hey—" I throw myself against them, hammering with both fists. "Hey! Let me out! Please, let me out—" Nothing. No footsteps. No voices. Just my own heartbeat slamming in my ears. I slide down the door and hug my knees. That's when I see it — three feet from my shoe, a dark stain sunk deep into the pale marble, scrubbed a thousand times and still there. Blood. Old blood. A lot of it. I scramble backward with a sound I don't recognize as mine. The house is enormous and completely silent, and I run through it like a rabbit through a trap — halls, portraits, dead-eyed statues, no way out, no way out. Then I hear water. I follow it because it's the only living sound in this tomb, and I shoulder open a heavy bronze door. Steam hits me in the face. It's a pool room — black tile, candlelight, columns wrapped in silk. And in the water, back turned, a man stands slowly up. Water runs down his shoulders, down the deep line of his spine, over ink and old scars. He steps out. He turns around. And every thought I've ever had goes out of my head, because the most beautiful face I have ever seen is looking at me with the eyes of something that eats girls like me for sport. He starts walking toward me.