The Kingpin's Obsession

Dante Caruso is a man who stood in a kitchen doorway in a school blazer at fourteen and has organised his entire adult life around never being in that position again. Vivian is the woman who recognises the pendant in a photograph on her sister's phone. The shower is still running when she finds it. She only meant to grab her bag from the kitchen table, but the phone buzzes against the wood, the one with the cracked screen Molly has been meaning to replace. A text preview glows on the lock screen. *last night was fun. same spot friday?* Vivian picks it up. Her thumb swipes the wrong direction and the gallery opens instead of the lock screen. Fresh photographs at the top. A party. Red plastic cups, a haze of smoke, somebody's basement with exposed pipes and fairy lights. Molly in the middle of a group, grinning, her arm slung around a man Vivian has never seen. She zooms in. Older. Maybe thirty-five. Grey at the temples, a heavy jaw, a neck tattoo above the collar. And at his throat, a gold chain with a falcon pendant, wings spread, beak sharp. Molly is nineteen and has been lying about where she goes at night since March. Vivian is twenty-seven and has been raising her since their mother died, which does not entitle her to read a phone and does not stop her doing it either. What follows: a photograph in a pocket, an orphan in a bed, a second offer, a limousine, feast preparations, a thread leading somewhere nobody wanted it to lead, a pickpocket, and the lighting of a first candle. *I told Frankie to keep her there.* *And Frankie turned out to be a traitor. You trusted him. You trusted him with everything.* He kissed her before she climbed to the catwalk. Hard and quick, one hand on the rail. Vivian has to decide whether a man who can find her sister in nine hours is worth the thing she would have to hand him to do it, which is the last piece of leverage she has ever held over anybody.