eyes like his—
Eyes that catch mine. He’s done with his assessment and I remember, suddenly, painfully, that I asked him to trade with me. The next move is his.
“I might be willing to make a trade.”
My knees give out, and I’m glad for the wall. I hook a hand around the nearest brick and keep myself standing. “You’ll let him go?”
“I’ll consider it.”
He takes a step toward me and stops, bending to pick something up off the sidewalk.
It’s my mitten.
Leo holds it out to me with a sarcastic flourish, the wrist hole pulled open by his fingers. It feels like a trap, sticking my hand into my own mitten.
I can’t do it.
He makes an impatient noise and pushes it over my hand himself. “Helpless, pathetic Constantines,” he says. “Like father, like daughter. Come with me.”
All the breath goes out of me. I summon enough oxygen to speak—barely. “Right now?”
The look Leo gives me is so cutting I want to cover my face with my hands. “You could stay here. Keep showing your tits to every fuckface who walks by.”
I jerk away from the wall like it’s the brick that stung me and not his words. Crossing my arms over my chest is a pointless move, but I do it anyway, face hot and red. I’m wearing a winter coat. I wasn’t showing anyone my tits. The fact that I was arched back against a wall in front of Leo Morelli should be incidental.
A gust of wind knifes under my collar. “Where are you taking me?”
“Do you see your gullible father here?” He brims with irritation and I have the ridiculous thought that it’s my fault we’re out here. It’s not. It’s this monster’s fault and no one else’s. “You want to see him, you’ll be a good girl and come with me.”
I could die. I could die, but instead I take the first step and follow him back down the block. He turns at an alley, an empty twin of the one with the barrel and the fire and those men. And there, in the alley, is my dad’s car. He’s not in it.
Leo holds up a hand to stop me from asking where my dad is and opens a door set into the side of the building. Fear makes my stomach clench. He could be luring me, too. He could be opening the door to a life where I’m too late, too late, too late.
But there’s no lifeless body on the other side. No cruel trick. It’s a restaurant, or some very small private club. Wine-colored tablecloths. Sturdy furniture.
Behind the bar, a large screen showing various shots of black-and-white alleyway. There you can see my dad’s car. My car. The vagrants huddled around the barrel.
Leo Morelli saw me coming. He knew I’d be there.
Dad sits in view of the door. When he sees me, he gives me an excited wave. A stack of papers waits on the table in front of him, a pen thrown to the side. They’ve already signed.
Leo’s voice is close, his breath warm on the shell of my ear. I can’t take my eyes off my father. Can’t help but see the way his eyes go from me to Leo, who must be a terrifying shadow in the dark of the alley. “If you want to save your father, you’ll have to pay,” he says, and my toes curl. There’s a whisper of pressure at my pocket. “Meet me here in twenty-four hours.”
4
Haley
I’m too afraid to let my dad out of my sight, and shaking too badly to drive. The Camry gets abandoned by the curb. It’s a long, quiet ride back to Bishop’s Landing.
I can’t say anything. Can’t begin to put into words what my father has done by signing those papers. By going to that meeting at all. We could have died. I narrowly avoided a fate worse than death. I still might die. There’s a business card with an address scrawled across it in my pocket. I’m afraid to take it out. I don’t want to show my father. I barely even want to acknowledge it to myself. Leo Morelli wants me to meet him in twenty-four hours. What will he do to me?
We’re wending our way through the ritzy neighborhoods when my father sighs. “It’s only a business deal, Haley. You don’t have to look so upset.”
My fingernails dig into the fabric of my purse in spite of myself. “Dad, you signed a contract with Leo Morelli.” I hold up the