Chapter 2: Six Years Later, My Son Ran Into a Queen

Six years is long enough to build a life out of nothing. I had a walk-up in Jersey with a cracked window. I had a license as a compounding pharmacist, earned under a name that wasn't mine. I had two hundred dollars in a coffee tin. And I had them. "Mama, watch me," Leo said, walking backward down the market aisle with his arms out. "I'm not even looking." "Leo Ricci, if you break another jar of arnica—" "Luna's breaking it," he said instantly. "I am not." My daughter, six years old, gold-eyed, and morally superior since birth, hugged the paper bag tighter. "He lies, Mama. He has a lying face." Five years and eleven months, and every time I looked at them I saw him. The same jaw. The same impossible eyes. Leo even scowled like him, which was unfair to everyone involved. I crouched in front of them at the fountain in Cathedral Square. "Stay. Both of you. I'm buying the eucalyptus and coming right back. Sixty seconds." "Sixty seconds," Leo said solemnly, and held his sister's hand. I made it forty. Then I heard the scream of tires, and the crowd went quiet the way crowds do when power arrives. Three black cars. Men in black coats stepping out in a line. And an old woman in a fur collar with white hair pinned like a crown, walking through a market that parted for her like water. Vittoria Moretti. Everyone in this city knew that face. And my son—my beautiful, disobedient son—had chased a rolling orange straight into her path and slammed into her legs. Ten guns came up at once. "Leo!" I dropped my basket. "Guns down!" the old woman roared, and her voice cracked across the square like a whip. She threw her arm around my son, shielding him with her own body. "You point steel at a child in front of me again and I'll bury you myself." The guns dropped. She looked down. Leo looked up. And I watched an eighty-year-old woman turn to stone. "Madonna santa," she whispered. Her hand trembled up to his cheek. "Dante. You have his face." "Sorry, signora," Leo said. "My orange got away." Tears rolled straight down her powdered cheeks. She didn't wipe them. "Bring the kit," she said hoarsely. "Now." A man in a suit produced a black leather case. A cheek swab, sealed in glass. "Sweetheart," she said, gentler than anything I'd ever heard from a woman like that, "let me touch this to your mouth. It takes one second. It's how I find out if you're mine." "Leo, no—" I shoved through the crowd. Too late. He opened his mouth like a good boy who trusted grandmothers. They ran it right there, in a handheld reader the size of a phone. Twelve seconds. The whole square held its breath. The screen blinked red. NO FAMILIAL MATCH. The light went out of her eyes so fast it hurt to watch. "That's not possible," she said. "I know that face." "Signora," her man said quietly, "he's not the boss's blood." She turned away like something inside her had been switched off. And I grabbed my son's hand and I ran, and I would have made it, I swear I would have made it— if Leo hadn't twisted around to wave goodbye and slammed straight into a woman in red. The box in her arms hit the cobblestones. Something inside it shattered. She screamed like she'd been stabbed. "My vial!" Red silk. Ruby crown. A face I recognized from the society pages of every paper in New York. Bianca Castellan. Daughter of Don Marco Castellan. The woman the whole city said would marry Dante Moretti before winter. "I'm so sorry," I gasped, shoving Leo behind me. "I'm a chemist—whatever it was, I can replace it, I can compound it—" "Replace it?" Her eyes were wild. "That was a Sicilian black-poppy extract. Twenty years of my life. One dose. For him." She pointed at my son with a shaking finger. "You filthy little bastard—" Her hand came around. I turned my body and took the slap across my face. The blow knocked my hood back. My hair came loose. My whole face was suddenly bare in the winter sun. Bianca froze. I watched her take in my mouth, my cheekbones, my eyes—and I watched her expression change from rage into something far worse. Hunger. "Well," she breathed, and she smiled. "Look what I found." She snapped her fingers without ever taking her eyes off me. "Take them. Both of them. Alive."