Bold letters in the center screamed at me like a confession beaten out of a dying man:
Investments carry risk. All losses due to personal judgment errors are the client's own responsibility.
My mother's signature sat at the bottom. Her fingerprint pressed into the paper like a blood oath she never understood she was making.
He'd been preparing for this. The Marconi Family's consigliere—that cold-eyed mouthpiece who'd buried a hundred sins beneath mountains of legal paperwork—was ready to crush me like I was nothing more than a rat scurrying too close to the Family's business.
Still, I went to the Marconi compound.
The elevator of their legitimate front—a towering monument of glass and steel that housed their import empire—carried me upward like a condemned woman ascending the gallows.
The doors slid open at the fifteenth floor, and there she stood.
Piper.
She was draped in custom Chanel, the fabric clinging to her like a second skin. Her handbag cost more than most soldiers earned in a year of wet work. And there, glittering on her wrist like a trophy ripped from a corpse—the princess bracelet.
My bracelet.