The Reaper's Queen

*"Your sister's pretty when she cries."* Lena sets her pen down, squares it with the edge of her desk, and looks up at a man in a cheap grey suit who has just shut her office door behind him. His name is Gorski. He works for Victor Silvano. Lena has been paying Silvano monthly for eighteen months. She is an accountant. She keeps records. She has never missed a payment in her life. Gorski turns the tablet around. Sofia is in a wooden chair in a basement, pink hair snarled with something dark and wet, lip split, and the gold hoop Lena gave her for her twenty-first birthday gone from an earlobe that is torn. Her mouth is moving. The same three words, over and over, with no sound. *"You've made payments toward the interest. The principal hasn't moved."* The debt started at twelve thousand dollars. Gorski gives her a new figure: four hundred seventy thousand. Lena runs the maths the way she runs every set of books she touches, and it does not work, not with compounding, not with late fees, not with the kind of terms that would make a legitimate lender blush. Then Gorski tells her that Sofia signed a new note six months ago. There is a business card on the desk with an address in Little Italy on it, written in silver ink. Eight o'clock. Come alone. The man waiting there is Dante Morelli, who she knows only by reputation in the accounting world: the son trying to clean up the family business, the one who brought in forensic auditors to go through every shell company his family operates. What he wants from her is not a payment. *"You marry me for one year. In exchange, your sister's debt is cleared. You'll continue working as my personal accountant, auditing my legitimate holdings and ensuring everything stays clean."* At the end of the year, a divorce and a fresh start. For her, and for Sofia. The contract runs to twenty-three pages, single-spaced. Lena reads it the way she reads everything, and stops on page four. A dark mafia romance about a woman who signs under duress and then starts quietly auditing the man who wrote the contract, a sister who lies out of love, and a debt whose arithmetic has never once added up. The romance is closed-door.