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.