Page 3 of Arrow

I wouldn’t leave him.

Not yet. Not until somebody did something.

“He’s cold,” I said, like it was profound, or would change anything.

Frank’s voice was sandpaper. “He was gone when we found him, Principessa.”⁠*

“He’s my brother.” My voice cracked. “Your friend.”

He jerked; his jaw ticked. “Yes, Miss.”

“We have to go after them. We have to⁠—”

Frank shook his head, and even his six-foot-four, tattooed like a medieval tapestry frame, looked smaller that night.

And I understood.

We wouldn’t. My father wouldn’t let us.

Eventually, they took my brother away, and my mother’s cries faded to a whimper, then to a silence she never recovered from.

And I learned something that night, something that the Virellis didn’t teach their daughter but should have.

When the men who are supposed to protect you won’t . . . you protect yourself.

* Princess

2

TWO

HARLOWE

People don’t talk about what happens to girls like me—daughters who inherit nothing but grief and their fathers’ grudges. They assume we get tucked away, sewn behind silk and lace, paraded at parties for men who don’t know our names.

And it’s true enough.

The next few years blurred, splintered with ceremonies and alliances I barely noticed. The world around me shrank and thickened, every surface covered in the fingerprints of men who killed for love in the way a dog will kill for its master—all loyalty, no hesitation.

Days after the funeral, my mother stopped talking altogether, dimmed like a candle running out of wick. She opened her windows at dusk, drew dark shapes in her journal, and waited for someone to tell her what to do with herself, before she swallowed a bottle of arsenic the following spring.

I found her in the garden, face up, and haloed by sprays of fallen wisteria. She looked almost peaceful. The only thing out of place was the white, waxy tablet stuck between her lips, like a wedding almond from some cruel reception. It bothered me more than the blue around her mouth or the way she’d soiled herself. My mother never left a mess, not even in death.

Frank was the one who carried her inside. He was always the one who carried what no one else would. I stood in the garden for hours after. The wisteria shifted in the wind, brushing against my bare arms and catching in my hair. Even surrounded by my family’s security detail and a garden’s worth of surveillance, I was invisible.

The funeral itself was a blur. I didn’t remember much, only the weight of my father’s hand on my head—the sting of his signet ring pressed into my scalp—while the priest spoke in Latin. I expected him to burn the earth and seek revenge for Luca’s murder, which led to my mother’s death, but in the end, my father folded like all the rest of them, because some debts even he wouldn’t collect.

I spent three years in my own kind of purgatory. I lied, drank, and stole little freedoms as if they could ever make a dent in what was owed. Since my brother’s death, I had this ache—an itch that was rooted deep in my soul that lying and drinking couldn’t even scratch. I turned to sex almost as an experiment, cycling through boys the way pit bosses cycle through dealers—rarely twice, and never without gloves.

Each time I fucked someone, there was a sliver of satisfaction—a gasp, a mark, a strand pulled taut between control and abandon. I learned how to break a heart before he even learned my last name, and how to surface from a stranger’s bed without feeling anything but a taut, vibrating null.

Sometimes I wished I were normal. Sometimes I tried to be, for the sake of a night or a conversation. I went on dates and pretended not to be spying on the exits. I smiled at people and tried not to bare my teeth. I wore bright dresses, took selfies, played the part, had acquaintances, sometimes even friends.

But at the end of every night, there was still that black rot inside me, and I could only ever soften it with the bitterest vodka and hardest fucks.

Frank kept tabs on me. He’d show up at clubs in Midtown, inconspicuous in his black tee and gold chain, and quietly shooed away the more persistent suitors. He’d drive me home in the back of the bulletproof car, chewing toothpicks and sighing like a priest charged with a particularly feral penitent. Sometimes we’d sit in the driveway for an hour, not saying anything, until I faked a grin and walked back in the house.

He never told my father, and I never asked why.