embernovel.com
The text came while I was hiding my newborn son in a janitor's closet. "Congratulations, Mrs. Castellano. Your husband has gambled you away. You now belong to Dante Russo." I stared at the screen, my back pressed against cold concrete, my four-day-old baby asleep against my chest in a stranger's stolen blanket. Then I typed back with shaking fingers: "I belong to no one. Try and collect." Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. "You don't understand, Mrs. Castellano. Mr. Russo owns this hospital. He owns the doctors who delivered your child. He owns the security footage of you stealing that blanket. Your husband owed him nine million dollars and offered the only thing he had left. You. Be at this address by midnight, or both of you disappear." An address followed. Tribeca. The penthouse kind that doesn't have a buzzer because nobody who matters needs one. I looked down at my son — Matteo, six pounds of impossible perfection — and felt the floor disappear beneath me. My husband had sold me. Again. Except this time, he'd done it the week I gave birth to his child. Nineteen months ago, I'd been a forensic accountant for the Manhattan DA's office. Sharp suits. Clean hands. A future. Then Tommy Castellano walked into a charity gala with a smile that could launder money and a fortune that didn't appear on any tax return, and I told myself a woman that smart could love a dangerous man and stay standing. I was wrong about almost everything. The first time Tommy raised his hand to me, I was three months pregnant. He'd lost forty grand at a card table and came home looking for somewhere to put the rage. I learned to read his moods like weather reports. I learned which rooms had cameras and which didn't. I learned that the man who'd promised me the world had only ever wanted to own a piece of it that couldn't fight back. I planned to run after the baby came. I had cash hidden in the lining of my coat, a fake ID sewn into the diaper bag, a bus ticket to nowhere. What I didn't plan for was Tommy showing up at the hospital, kissing my forehead, whispering, "I'm sorry, baby. I had to. It was you or me" — and walking out before I understood what he meant. Now I had until midnight. I wrapped Matteo tighter, slipped out the service exit, and hailed a cab with the last forty dollars I owned. The Tribeca tower rose out of the dark like a black blade. A man in a tailored coat opened my door before the cab fully stopped. His eyes dropped to the bundle in my arms, and something flickered across his face — surprise, then something colder. "Mrs. Castellano. Mr. Russo is expecting you." A pause. "He is not expecting an infant." I climbed out, four days postpartum, bleeding through a hospital pad, holding everything I had left in the entire world. "Then your boss is about to learn something," I said. "I come as a package deal."