The scent of smoke from the shot he’d fired permeated her senses. Countless bullets had been fired in her direction, but this shot rang in her ears over and over. Her head still pounded from Kohl’s punch. She gulped to bring some moisture to her dry throat. A heavy weight settled on her chest, making it hard to breathe, and hope vanished from her like smoke plumes into the sky above Kosín’s factories; it left a stain.

She was a fool for thinking this chance to be successful was actually real. Whenever happiness seemed close, reality snatched it away. She would have been better off sticking with Kohl for the rest of her life. At least then she’d have his protection. Whatever reputation she’d built up over the years was gone now.

It was true: Good things don’t happen to girls who come from nothing.

She’d been a fool to think she was different. But if she, a trained killer, made into one of the most feared people in the south of the city, couldn’t make something of herself, what did that say for kids still sleeping on the street with no one to help them? She’d failed them all.

And Kohl had shot at her. Kohl had nearly killed her.

He never misses, she thought to reassure herself. That had been a warning shot, nothing else.

One of her hands impulsively clenched a weed growing in the alley. The weeds stuck out of the irregular patches of cobblestone, choked and curling from green to yellow to brown.

An image as clear as a summer sky flashed through her mind: rain pounding on the weeds and flowers that had grown near her old house. Her father had knelt next to her, his thick, black mustache ruffled by the wind, and together they’d watched the lightning blaze across the sky on one of those quiet days before the Estrel Ka-Noten, the night the stars fell, when there was so much blood and violence that people said even the sky looked red and no one could see the stars. Her parents had only lived for a few years after the war.

A peal of thunder had sent her cowering under his big arms. She’d told him she wished she could be one of the creatures from a particular Milano folktale he’d told her, the magical being that could change form between bird, butterfly, insect, and any other animal as easily as breathing. Then, she could transform into a firefly and dart through all the raindrops with the Mothers guiding her until she reached somewhere dry.

She usually suppressed memories of her parents, but now her father’s words came back to her clearly. In the crispest southern Milano dialect, her father had told her: Even if a lion dresses in silk, it will always be a lion.

She couldn’t have become a firefly to escape the rain any more easily than she could cease to be the helpless girl Kohl had saved from the bombing six years ago. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to remind herself she wasn’t helpless anymore.