Chapter 1 - The Scent of Blood and Cheap Carnations
The kitchen was completely dark except for the pulsing amber glow of a cigar.
Roman Costa should not have been awake. He definitely should not have been waiting for her.
Sadie froze with her hand hovering inches from the light switch. Then Roman moved out of the shadows, the oppressive silence of the house pressing hard against her eardrums. His dark eyes bypassed her face entirely and locked onto the pale pink carnations sitting on the counter.
“Who gave you those flowers?” Roman whispered, the gravel in his voice scraping against the quiet.
Working for a crime syndicate was not like the movies. It was not a string of glamorous parties, sharply tailored suits, and clinking champagne flutes. It was bleach. Gallons and gallons of industrial-strength bleach. It was silence, heavy and suffocating, and the constant, exhausting effort of making yourself as small and invisible as a field mouse.
Earlier that afternoon, Sadie had wiped down the marble island in the kitchen for the fourth time. Dust did not settle in the Costa estate. The air was too thick with tension for anything to truly rest. She pressed her weight into the rag, scrubbing at a faint water ring until her knuckles ached.
At twenty-four, Sadie had spent three years blending into the beige wallpaper and dark mahogany of the fortress on Long Island. She wore a starched gray uniform that fit poorly, kept her hair tied back in a severe, joyless knot, and spoke only when spoken to, which was rare.
The staff had three unspoken rules.
Never look Roman Costa in the eye.
Never ask about the dark, rust-colored stains that sometimes ruined the cuffs of his expensive dress shirts.
Never touch the locked drawers in his ground-floor study.
Sadie followed those rules with religious devotion. It kept her employed. More importantly, it kept her breathing.
But that day, a tiny crack had formed in the sterile, terrifying routine of her life. Near the staff sink sat a small, slightly bruised bouquet of pink carnations and baby’s breath in a cheap, cloudy glass vase. Harmless. Sweet. Entirely out of place in a house built on extortion, concrete, and blood.
The flowers had arrived at noon. The delivery boy from the local bakery in town had brought the weekly order of fresh bread. His name was Toby. He was nineteen, all elbows and nervous smiles, and he had spent the last two months lingering at the service entrance longer than necessary. That day, he had shoved the paper-wrapped bundle of flowers into Sadie’s hands, turned the color of a bruised plum, and sprinted back to his delivery van before she could even thank him.
She should have thrown them away. The Costa estate was a place devoid of color. Bringing bright pink flowers into the house felt like sneaking a bomb through security. But she had not thrown them away. She had filled a water glass, trimmed the stems with kitchen shears, and set them on the counter. Just for the afternoon. Just to look at something that had not been bought with dirty money.
Every time Sadie walked past the sink, she caught a faint, peppery whiff of the carnations. For a split second, she was not a maid in a mob boss’s house. She was simply a girl who had received flowers.
The fantasy shattered at exactly six that evening.
The heavy oak front doors opened with a deep, echoing thud. The sound reverberated through the first floor, sending an immediate electric shock of anxiety through the staff. Roman was home early.
Sadie stopped scrubbing the counter. In the adjoining dining room, two other maids abandoned their polishing rags and practically melted into the hallways, seeking refuge on the upper floors. Sadie stayed where she was. If you ran too fast, you drew attention. If you stayed too still, you became an obstacle.
She heard the heavy tread of Roman’s boots on the hardwood. Roman Costa did not walk. He prowled. There was a predatory economy to his movements. He never wasted a step. He was a man who carried the weight of his father’s violent empire on his shoulders, and he wore the burden like a suit of armor.
He moved past the kitchen archway. Sadie kept her head down, her eyes fixed firmly on the polished toes of his leather boots. She caught his scent as he passed: a sharp mixture of expensive bergamot cologne, stale cigarette smoke, and the faint metallic tang of copper. Rain clung to the wool of his dark coat. He did not glance in her direction. He rarely did. To Roman, the staff were furniture that occasionally swept the floors.
“I want the perimeter locked down,” Roman said from the foyer, his voice low and flat. He was speaking to his underboss, Marco, a hulking shadow of a man who always trailed a few steps behind him. “Nobody comes through the front gate unless I clear it. If that rat shows his face again, break his knees and leave him in the driveway.”
“Yes, boss.”
“And get me a drink. Bring it to the study.”
The heavy mahogany door of Roman’s study clicked shut. The lock engaged with a sharp snap. The house seemed to release a collective breath.
Sadie remained in the kitchen for a long time, listening as rain began lashing against the reinforced glass windows. She looked at the pink carnations beside the sink. Suddenly, they did not look sweet anymore. They looked stupid. Naive. A splash of pathetic optimism in a house that ground optimism into dust.
Sadie reached out, intending to snatch them from the glass and bury them at the bottom of the trash beneath the coffee grounds. But her shift was over. Her legs ached. Her head was pounding, and she was too tired to care. She left the flowers on the counter, switched off the overhead fluorescent lights, and retreated to her small quarters in the basement.
She thought she was safe. She thought the day was over.
At two in the morning, thirst woke her. It was a dry, scraping feeling in the back of her throat caused by the suffocating heat of the basement radiator. Sadie lay in the darkness for ten minutes, trying to ignore it, trying to force herself back to sleep. The basement was safe. Upstairs was not. But eventually, thirst won.
She slipped from her narrow bed and shivered as her bare feet touched the cold concrete floor. She did not bother with a robe. She wore an oversized, faded gray T-shirt and loose cotton shorts. The house was a tomb at that hour. The guards were stationed outside in the rain, and Roman was surely asleep in his sprawling master suite on the third floor.
Sadie crept up the back stairwell, opening the heavy fire door to the main floor with practiced, agonizing slowness to keep its hinges from squeaking. The hallway was pitch-black. She did not turn on a light. She navigated from memory and the faint gray illumination bleeding through the tall windows from the security floodlights outside.
She entered the cavernous kitchen. She did not see Roman at first. The room was massive, all stainless steel and black marble, swallowing the shadows. Sadie went directly to the refrigerator, pulled open the heavy door, and took out a plastic bottle of water. She twisted off the cap and drank deeply.
Then she heard it. The faint, wet clink of ice against crystal.
Sadie froze. The bottle slipped an inch in her sweaty grip. Slowly, she turned her head, her heart slamming against her ribs like a trapped animal.
Roman was sitting in the darkest corner of the kitchen at the small breakfast table normally reserved for the head chef. He was slouched in the chair, his long legs stretched out in front of him. His tailored suit jacket was gone. His white dress shirt was unbuttoned at the collar, its sleeves rolled to his forearms, exposing the dark, creeping ink of his tattoos. In his right hand, he held a lowball glass of Scotch. In his left, a cigar smoldered, casting a faint orange glow across his sharp, exhausted features.
He was watching her. He had been watching her the entire time.
“Sir,” Sadie breathed. Her voice cracked. She immediately dropped her gaze toward the floor, heat flooding her cheeks. Crossing her arms over her chest, she became suddenly, painfully aware of her bare legs and the thin fabric of her worn T-shirt. “I apologize. I didn’t think anyone was awake. I’ll leave.”
She stepped backward toward the hallway.
“Stop.”
Roman did not shout. The word was barely above a murmur, but it struck her like a physical blow. Sadie’s bare feet seemed to glue themselves to the marble. Roman took a slow drag from his cigar. The ember flared, briefly illuminating the deep circles beneath his eyes and the hard, unforgiving line of his jaw. He exhaled a thick plume of gray smoke into the dark kitchen.
He did not look at her face. His dark, heavy gaze remained fixed on something to her left.
“Who gave you those flowers?”
Sadie blinked. Her mind went blank. She looked toward the sink. The pink carnations were barely visible in the gloom, a grayish smudge against the backsplash.
“The flowers, sir?”
Of all the things a mafia boss could have asked his maid in the middle of the night, this had not even been a possibility in her mind.
Roman set his glass on the table. The sound seemed deafening in the silence. Then he stood. He was a massive man, well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered and lethal. As he closed the distance between them, the sheer physical gravity of him seemed to draw the oxygen from the room. Sadie pressed her spine against the refrigerator door. Cold steel seeped through her shirt and made her shiver.
Roman stopped less than two feet away. She could smell Scotch on his breath, bitter and sharp beneath the cigar smoke. Sadie kept her eyes firmly trained on his collarbone.
“I asked you a question, Sadie.”
He knew her name. The realization sent a cold spike of adrenaline through her nervous system. In three years, Roman had never called her by name. She had simply been the girl or you.
“They were just a gift,” she said, her voice shaking violently. “From the bakery delivery boy. Toby. He brought the bread this afternoon. It was nothing, sir. I can throw them away.”
“Toby.” Roman rolled the name around in his mouth as though it were spoiled meat. “The kid with the stutter who drives the beat-up Ford.”
He knew the delivery boy. He knew everything.
Roman reached out. Sadie flinched and braced herself, but his hand bypassed her completely. He picked up the cheap glass vase. Holding it in the dim light, he rotated it slowly. His large, calloused fingers dwarfed the fragile glass.
“Pink carnations,” he murmured. His tone was impossible to read. It was not anger exactly. It was something colder. More calculating. “Bought from the corner bodega, probably. Three dollars, wrapped in newspaper. And he handed them to you at my back door.”
“I didn’t ask for them,” Sadie said quickly. “I didn’t encourage it. I swear.”
Roman looked down at her. For the first time in three years, she felt the full, unfiltered weight of his gaze. It was intoxicating and terrifying. His eyes were not just dark; they were an abyss.
“You didn’t answer my question earlier,” Roman said, his voice dropping an octave, vibrating right through the space between them. “Do you like them?”
“What?” Sadie stammered.
“Do you like these cheap, dying weeds?”
Sadie swallowed hard, the dryness returning to her throat with a vengeance. She didn’t know what answer would keep her alive. “They... they smell nice.”
Roman stared at her for five agonizing seconds. Then, without a word, he turned his hand upside down.
The glass vase smashed violently against the marble floor. Water splattered across Sadie’s bare shins, and the pale pink flowers lay crushed amid jagged shards of broken glass.
Sadie gasped, leaping back.
Roman didn’t even look at the mess. He leaned in, his face inches from hers, the heat of his skin overwhelming. “Tomorrow morning, Sadie, the bakery gets a new driver. And if another man brings garbage onto my property to buy your smile, I won’t just break the vase.”
May you like
He turned and walked away into the dark corridor, leaving Sadie trembling among the wet glass and ruined petals.
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