Chapter 1 - The Invitation Under the Door
The cream-colored cardstock sat on my warped linoleum floor like an unexploded shell. I didn't pick it up immediately. I stood with my back pressed against the peeling paint of my apartment door, breathing in the smell of boiling cabbage from 3B and the damp mildew that lived inside the radiator.
My studio was four hundred square feet in a corner of Queens that tourists never saw. The lock was loose. The fire escape window didn't shut all the way. Yet someone had navigated three flights of stairs, bypassed the building buzzer that hadn't worked since August, and slipped heavy, linen-textured paper beneath my threshold without making a sound.
My fingers trembled when I finally picked it up. Heavy weight. Gilded edges. The ink was dark sepia, drawn with the sharp nib of a fountain pen.
Dinner. Thursday. Ferrante.
No phone number. No restaurant name. No RSVP.
A normal woman might have called the police, but New York police did not dispatch cruisers for an expensive business card left in an entryway. Besides, the name Ferrante didn’t belong in police blotters. It belonged in hushed conversations behind the cash registers of Italian delis on Arthur Avenue, or tucked away in the back pages of the Post under euphemisms like ""private logistics"" and ""waterfront labor disputes.""
Matteo Ferrante wasn't a businessman. He was an empire.
I barely slept that night. Every time the floorboards creaked in the hallway, I imagined dark-suited men with coiled earpieces standing in the dim light of the sixty-watt bulb outside my door. Every time the pipes clattered, I remembered the way Marco had clutched my fingers with his tiny, sticky hands. Papà. The fear on that boy's face had been real. But the chill in the bodyguard’s voice was even more real: She wasn't supposed to be there.
What did that mean? Was Marco's disappearance planned? Had I interrupted a kidnapping? Or worse, had they assumed I was a plant—an operative using basic Italian to worm my way into the good graces of Manhattan's most dangerous widower?
Wednesday passed in a haze of burnt espresso beans and spilled oat milk. Midtown Grounds was slammed from open to close. Every time the brass bell above the door chimed, my neck prickled with heat. I dropped three ceramic mugs. My manager, a perpetually sweating man named Carl, docked my pay thirty dollars and told me to get my head out of the clouds. He didn't know that my head wasn't in the clouds; it was six feet under, imagining an unmarked grave in the New Jersey wetlands.
When Thursday arrived, the air smelled like rain. I finished my shift at three, took the subway back across the East River, and stared into my closet. I owned three pairs of jeans, two black barista shirts, and one charcoal-grey thrift-store sheath dress I had bought for my mother’s memorial service two years ago. It was conservative, plain, and clean.
I had no idea where I was going, or how he expected me to get there.
At exactly six o'clock, a knock sounded on my door. Three measured raps. Not loud, but heavy enough to vibrate the wood.
I opened it.
Standing in the hallway was one of the men from Bryant Park. He wore an immaculate bespoke suit that looked entirely out of place next to the graffiti on my neighbor's doorframe. His hands were folded neatly in front of his waist.
""Miss Bloom,"" he said, giving a curt, respectful nod. ""Mr. Ferrante is waiting downstairs.""
""I didn't agree to this,"" I said, my voice wavering before I caught it.
May you like
""He knows,"" the man replied, his expression completely blank. ""The car is warm. It's starting to rain.""
I grabbed my faux-leather purse, tucked the key into my pocket, and followed him into the dark hallway, wondering if I would ever see my tiny, miserable apartment again.
