Chapter 2

"Why didn't you call me?" I asked her. "Lily, half a year. Why didn't you tell me?"

She flinched like the question had teeth. "I tried, Mom. I called so many times, and it never went through. Never."

She was right, and I knew it. The last two months of my trip I had been closing a deal in the mountains, in a place where phones simply did not work.

Rosa answered the house line every week with the same report. The young miss is dieting well. The young miss is in wonderful spirits. Please don't worry, madam.

"And every time Ashley found out I tried to call you, she punished me," Lily whispered. "She locked me in the garage for two days with no food. Jake stood guard outside the door the whole time."

Jake. I had picked that boy out of forty candidates and paid him triple the market rate to stand between my daughter and the world. Somewhere along the way he became Ashley's boyfriend, and my daughter's jailer.

Lily used to like him. She told me so herself two summers ago, blushing to her ears. Now she said his name and her hands shook.

"Ashley said you knew," she went on. "She said you were ashamed of me. She said you told her a fat daughter was an embarrassment, and you were going to adopt her as your real daughter and send me away somewhere and never look at me again."

Every word landed like a hammer. I took her face in my hands and made her look at me.

"Listen to me. Every word she told you was a lie. There is no world where I give you up. Not for anyone. Do you understand me?"

She nodded, but her eyes didn't believe me yet. That would take time, and for the first time in six months, I had time.

I stood and pulled her gently to her feet. "We're leaving. And then I am going to make every single one of them pay for what they did to you."

Her reaction was instant. She grabbed my sleeve with both hands, frantic. "No. Mom, no, please. You don't understand. Jake knows people. Dangerous people. Gangsters. He has men watching me all the time."

I kept my face very still. "What men?"

"I don't know. Men in suits. They follow me everywhere. Jake said if I ever ran or told anyone, they would hurt you." Her voice broke apart. "Just take me away, Mom. I don't want revenge. I just want to go home."

Men in suits. I almost laughed out loud.

Two years ago I left a security detail of eight men in this city with one single order: watch my daughter from a distance and keep her breathing. They were soldiers from my organization, the bottom layer, the kind who never learn whose hand feeds them. Lily never knew they existed, because I never wanted her to know what her mother really was.

Jake had figured out what they were. And he had turned my own dogs loose on my daughter.

"Okay," I said softly, and smoothed her hair. "I'll handle it. Trust me one more time."

The storage room door banged open before she could answer. The owner stood there with his arms folded, and his little eyes had clearly been busy doing math while he waited. He had seen my watch. He had heard the helicopter.

"I've been thinking," he announced. "Ten times was this morning's price. But a rich lady like you, dropping out of the sky into my humble store? The price is a hundred times now. Three hundred thousand dollars."

I looked at him. "For a three-dollar sandwich."

"For emotional damages," he said, grinning. "Or neither of you walks out of here. My cousin's a cop, so think real hard about who he'll believe."

Lily pressed against my back, and I could feel her terror through my coat. That was the moment the last thin thread of my patience snapped.

I took out my phone and dialed a number I had not used in six months. It rang once before a man answered.

"The deli on Fifth," I said. "Everyone."

The owner laughed. "Who'd you call, your husband?"

Two minutes later, three black SUVs mounted the curb outside. Six men came through the door in dark suits, built like walls, and the owner's grin slid off his face as the first gun came level with his forehead. Then there were five more, and the only sound in that shop was the clicking of safeties.

The man went white as paper, and his knees buckled where he stood.

I crouched down and turned Lily's face gently out of my coat, and I stroked her hair the way I used to when she was small.

"Don't be afraid, sweetheart," I said. "Mom is the Donna of the mafia."