The Don's Possession

Eight straight hours with a loupe pressed into her brow, and the red ring it leaves is not worth checking in a mirror. That is the indignity this story starts from: a woman doing exquisite work in a shop she is about to lose. Francesca sets down the tweezers and rolls her shoulders until the joints pop. The diamond sits in its prongs like a good dog, patient and expensive and not entirely hers to keep. She has set the halo just right, six smaller stones radiating around the centre, each one catching the fluorescent light. The client wants it by Friday. The client is paying enough to keep the lights on through winter. The shop smells of metal shavings and the lemon polish her father used on every display case, religiously, as though the cases mattered more than the things inside them. Rain streaks the front window and turns the street into a smear of brake lights and neon. Then a man arrives to explain that a debt is due and that his employer does not extend credit to anyone, and the name he gives lands cold in her chest. She saw Alessandro De Luca once, at a funeral three years ago. Tall, dark-haired, with a scar running where a scar should not survive. What follows: a debt she never signed, a gilded cage, a workshop full of lies, a bitter vintage, the weight of trust handed to the wrong person, a scar's confession, a first stone thrown in public, and one meal eaten without a war breaking out over it. *He lied to me. Used me. Kept me like a tool in his basement.* He gave her a gun, a key and a chance to fight back. He kissed her in the dark and promised her the shop back and told her the truth about one thing out of four. Will the promise made in that workshop hold when the people who actually own the debt come to collect? Or does Francesca take the key, take the gun, and say goodbye to the only person who ever treated her hands as an asset rather than a bill?