Here was pain.
Here was anger.
Here was her husband, that cheating fuck.
Here was him slamming her head into the table.
Here was his arm sweeping the candles.
Here was her voice breaking, her lungs filling with smoke.
Here was his back as he walked away, and left her to die.
That light, she left on. She marveled at the way it grew brighter inside her head, at the warmth that came with it, rippling through her skin. Her fingers tightened on the bedrail. It went soft under her palm, the smooth metal rusting away, a red stain spreading along the steel. By the time she noticed, pulled away, a section the length of her forearm was already ruined, flaking onto the bed.
Marcella stared, uncomprehending.
She looked from her hand to the metal, and back, felt the heat still wicking off her skin. She clutched the thin hospital sheets instead, but they crumbled too, the fabric rotting away in the span of a breath, leaving only a patina of ash behind.
Marcella raised both hands now, not in surrender, but in fascination, the palms turned up toward her face, searching for an explanation, a fundamental change, and finding only her own ruined manicure, a familiar hand-shaped bruise going green around her wrist, a white hospital band with the wrong name printed on it: Melinda Pierce.
Marcella frowned. The other details were all correct—she recognized her age, her date of birth—but it seemed someone had entered her into the system under a false name. Which meant they didn’t want Marcus to know she was here. Or to know she was alive. A reasonable choice, she thought, considering the events of earlier that night. Or was it tomorrow? Time felt muddy.
The wounds felt fresh enough.
Without the sheets, she could see the bandages tracing their way up her legs, winding across her stomach, around her shoulder, the mirror image of a candelabra burned into her—
A police radio went off, the sharp static setting it apart from the dozens of other hospital sounds. Marcella’s attention flicked to the door. It was closed, but through the glass insert she spotted a cop’s uniform.
Slowly, Marcella managed to draw herself up from the bed, despite the various cables and cords connecting her to the medical bay. Her hand reached for the IV stand before she remembered the stretch of rusted steel, the crumbling sheet. She hesitated, but her palm felt cool again, and as her fingers closed around the plastic cord nothing terrible happened. Gingerly, Marcella disconnected the line and then, careful not to dislodge the heart monitor, she reached around and pulled the power cord instead.
The machines went quiet, their screens black.
Marcella’s hospital gown hung loose, a mercy given the contact with her tender skin, but also a hindrance: she couldn’t slip out wearing nothing but a sheet.
A sterile white wardrobe stood in the corner, and she went to it, irrationally hoping to find her clothes, her purse, her keys, but of course it was empty.
Beyond the door, she heard a gruff voice.
“. . . still hasn’t woken up . . . no, we’ve kept it off the news . . . I’ve already called WITSEC . . .”
Marcella sneered. WITSEC. She hadn’t designed this life, built a future from nothing, just to spend it hiding. And she’d be damned if she disappeared before her husband. Marcella turned, surveying the room, but there was nothing but the one door, and a window looking out over Merit from at least six stories up.
One room, one door. One window.
And two walls.
Marcella picked the one opposite her bed, pressed her ear to the wall, and heard nothing—just the steady beep of more hospital equipment.
She brought her fingers to the plaster, barely touching.
Nothing happened.
Slowly, Marcella pressed her palm flat against the wall. Nothing. She glared at her hand, the nails cracked where her desperate fingers had dug into the silk-threaded carpet, clawed at the wood floor—
Her hand began to glow. Marcella watched the wall beneath her fingers warping, rotting, drywall slouching as if with damp, or gravity, or time, until a broad hole formed between the rooms, large enough to step through.
Marcella marveled, then, at her hand, at the damage it had done. So it wasn’t a matter of force, but feeling.
That was fine.
Marcella had quite a lot of feelings.
She drew the power back into her chest, as if it were a breath. There it burned, less like a fuse than a pilot light. Steady and waiting.
Marcella stepped through the ruined wall, and into the next room.
The door to the room was ajar, and the woman in the bed—Alice Tolensky, according to the clipboard—was three inches shorter than Marcella and a good thirty pounds heavier.
Her clothes hung in the small, hospital-issued wardrobe.
Marcella wrinkled her nose as she considered the slip-on flats, the frills on the collar of the flower-printed blouse, the jeans with their elastic waist.
But beggars couldn’t be choosers. Marcella was grateful for the room in the jeans when she had to pull them on. She stifled a breath as the denim grazed her bandages, then turned her attention back to the closet.
A knockoff leather purse slumped on the shelf. Marcella rifled through the contents and came up with a hundred dollars in cash and a pair of glasses.
She finished getting dressed, tugged her hair into a bun at the nape of her neck, slipped on the glasses, and stepped into the hall. The cop in front of her door was picking at a bandage on his hand. He didn’t look up as Marcella turned and left.
A queue of taxis waited outside the hospital.
She climbed into the nearest one.
“Address?” rumbled the driver.
“The Heights.” It was the first time she’d spoken, and her voice was raw from smoke, a fraction lower and edged with the luscious rasp that so many starlets craved. “On Grand.”
The car pulled away, and Marcella leaned back against the leather seat.
She had always been good under pressure.
Other women could afford to panic, but being a mob wife required a certain level of poise. It meant staying calm. Or at least feigning calm.
At the moment, Marcella didn’t feel like she was feigning anything. There was no fear, no doubt. Her head wasn’t spinning. She didn’t feel lost. If anything, this road she was on felt paved and straight, the end lit by a single, blinding light.
And beneath that light stood Marcus Andover Riggins.
II
REVELATION
I
FOURTEEN YEARS AGO
UNIVERSITY OF MERIT
EVERYONE was shitfaced.
Marcella sat on the kitchen counter, her heels knocking absently against the cabinets as she watched them stumble past, sloshing drinks and shouting to be heard. The house was filled with music, bodies, stale booze and cheap cologne, and all the other inane trappings of a college frat party. Her friends had convinced her to come, with the weak argument that it was just what students did, that there would be free beer and hot guys and it would be fun.
Those same girls were lost somewhere in the mass of bodies. Every now and then she thought she caught a glimpse of a familiar blond bob, a high brown ponytail. Then again, there were a dozen of them. Cookie-cutter college kids. More concerned with blending in than standing out.
Marcella Renee Morgan was not having fun.
She was nursing a beer in a glass bottle, and she was bored—bored by the music, and the boys who swaggered over every now and then to flirt, and then stormed away, sulking, when she turned them down. She was bored by being called beautiful, and then a bitch. Stunning, and then stuck up. A ten, and then a tease.
Marcella had always been pretty. The kind of pretty people couldn’t ignore. Bright blue eyes and pitch-black hair, a heart-shaped face atop the lean, clean lines of a model. Her father told her she’d never have to work. Her mother said she’d have to work twice as hard. In a way, both of them were right.
Her body was the first thing people saw.
For most, it seemed to be the last thing, too.
“You’re think you’re better than me?” a drunken senior had slurred at her earlier.
Marcella had looked at him straight on, his eyes bleary, hers sharp, and said simply, “Yes.”
“Bitch,” he’d muttered, storming away. Predictable.
Marcella had promised her friends she’d stay for a drink. She tipped the bottle back, eager to finish the beer.
“I see you found the good stuff,” said a deep voice, rich, with a faint southern lilt.
She glanced up and saw a guy leaning back against the kitchen island. Marcella didn’t know what he was talking about, not until he nodded at the glass bottle in her hand with the plastic cup in his own. She gestured at the fridge. He crossed to it, retrieving two more bottles. He cracked them open against the counter’s edge and offered one to her.
Marcella took it, considering him over the rim.
His eyes were dark blue, his hair sun-kissed, that warm shade between blond and brown. Most of the guys at the party hadn’t shed their baby fat, high school still clinging to them like wet clothes, but his black shirt stretched tight over strong shoulders, and his jaw was sharp, a small cleft denting his chin.
“Marcus,” he said by way of introduction. She knew who he was. She’d seen him on campus, but it was Alice who’d told her—Marcus Riggins was trouble. Not because he was gorgeous. Not because he was rich. Nothing so bland as all that. No, Marcus was trouble for one simple, delicious reason: his family was in the mob. Alice had said it like it was a bad thing, a deal breaker, but if anything, it only piqued her interest.