Page 15 of Hunting Snow

"The runner I assign has forty-eight hours once the contract is accepted. If the job isn't completed in that window, the runner is terminated from the contract and the job goes back into rotation. No refund on the first attempt. That's policy."

"Understood."

"If this comes back to Genesis, if the fallout touches this floor or my people in any capacity, the consequences land on you. Not the runner, not Sapphire, not me. You. Are we clear?"

"Crystal."

He holds my gaze one beat longer, searching for doubt or hesitation. He won't find either. I buried both years ago, somewhere between my first marriage of convenience and the day I stood at a graveside watching a mahogany casket lower into the ground while the lawyers in my pocket were already drafting the paperwork to consolidate what should have been mine from the start.

Harlon turns to Sapphire. "Assign it."

She opens her laptop and strikes a single key. "Done. The contract is live. The runner will receive the details within the hour."

Harlon leaves the way he arrived. The elevator doors close behind him and the Dark Floor settles back into its impossible quiet.

I rise from the chair and adjust the lapel of my suit jacket. Fourteen months of patience, phone calls, manufactured sweetness, and carefully worded conversations with lawyers who moved too slowly and I’m finally going to get what I am owed.

"Is there anything else, Mrs. Castellano?"

"No. That will be all."

I cross the lounge the way I entered. Heels on black carpet. Runners watching from their sofas with lazy, predatory interest. The scent of gunpowder and roses hangs thick in the cool air. I don't hurry or glance at any of them, either. I don't wonder which one Sapphire will assign to end my stepdaughter's life, and I don't care. The specifics are no longer my concern. I've placed the order. The machine will deliver.

The elevator carries me back to the sub-basement. My driver opens the door and I slide into the leather seat, smoothing my skirt across my thighs. The car hums to life and pulls from the structure into the Chicago night.

Streetlights slide across the tinted windows. The city glitters and breathes beyond the glass, millions of people living ordinary lives in ordinary buildings while transactions like the one I just completed happen beneath their feet in velvet-lined silence.

I open my clutch and remove a compact mirror. My lipstick has held perfectly. Not a smudge, not a feathered line. I snap the compact shut and settle into the seat.

Neve chose flour and sugar over her birthright. Over a throne. She chose a life the size of a galley kitchen and expected our world to respect her smallness. She could have shared in the empire her father built from blood. I’m a generous woman when I want to be.

Instead, she makes apple tarts for retired firefighters and college students. How pathetic.

I pull my phone from my clutch and delete the call history from this evening. The number I used to contact Sapphire's line. The confirmation text. All of it, gone with a few swipes.

The car turns onto Lake Shore Drive and the dark water of Lake Michigan stretches endlessly to my left. I rest my head against the seat.

I have clawed my way from a one-bedroom apartment with stained carpet and a mother who drank herself blind before noon to the passenger seat of a Castellano vehicle, wearing Valentino, diamonds, and holding the keys to an empire a dead man tried to keep from me with ink and legal clauses.

What a fool.

Every rung of that climb cost me something. My pride, my youth, my softness, my ability to look at a photograph of a twenty-three-year-old girl and feel anything other than the cold math of what her absence is worth. I endured a decade of marriage to a man I tolerated because his name and his money were the ladder I needed to climb to the top. I smiled at his family dinners. I kissed his daughter's forehead at Christmas. I performed the role of a loving wife with such precision that even Elio, a man who built an empire on reading people, never once suspected the depth of my…patience.

I paid my debt. I earned my seat.

A girl with flour on her face and her dead father's recipe cards is not going to take it from me.

"Home, Mrs. Castellano?"

I smooth a hand over my chignon. Every pin in place. Every strand where it belongs.

"Home."

The city slides past and I don't give a second thought about Genesis, the Dark Floor, or the photograph of my stepdaughter's trusting smile still sitting on a dark wood table in a room built for the business of killing.

Queens never look back.

CHAPTER 6