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PART 1 Elena Marchetti had worked for the Moretti family for twenty-two years. She had outlasted three business partners, two attorneys, one financial advisor who had made the specific error of misunderstanding the difference between managed and finished, and four previous women who had come through the front door of the Moretti estate on the…

PART 1 She had made one mistake. Kaye ran through the checklist the way she had been trained: before sleep, upon waking, before entering any new space. The checklist was her father’s. He had given it to her at fourteen, which was the age he decided she was old enough to understand the world they…

PART 1 There are things Grace Harrison knew about herself before she took the job at Phillips International. She talked to herself constantly, in public, without any reliable warning system between thought and speech. She had strong opinions about inanimate objects and frequently expressed them. She had once given a twenty-minute pep talk to a…

PART 1 My name is Leo Ferrante. I have served Dominic Russo for fourteen years, and in that time I have delivered messages that changed cities, driven cars that carried men who would not be seen again, and stood in rooms where the decisions made would not appear in any newspaper. I am not sentimental…

PART 1 My name is Mariana Torres, and the day my husband came back was the worst day of my life. Which tells you something about the day he left. When Daniel walked out eight months ago, he did it with the specific carelessness of a man who had decided his own freedom was the…

PART 1 My name is Victor Reyes. I have worked for Dominic Moretti for eight years, which is a long time in this line of work. Long enough to know every register of his voice. Long enough to anticipate what he wants before he knows he wants it. Long enough to understand the difference between…

PART 1 The rare books room at the Boston Public Library smelled like aged paper, cedar oil, and the specific atmospheric quality of things that had survived by being cared for. Allara Ren had loved this smell since she was seven years old, which made it one of the oldest things she still trusted. She…

PART 1 Ryan Callahan had managed Eclipse for six years. In that time, he had removed exactly three customers from the restaurant, which was a number lower than most establishments of Eclipse’s size primarily because the clientele — twenty-second floor of a glass tower, forty-dollar appetizers, reservation required six weeks in advance — generally had…

PART 1 Luca Moretti had been watching over the Veyron household for twelve years. Not the public version of watching — the guards at gates, the cameras in corners, the routine that money bought and professionalism maintained. The other kind. The kind that happened when you were the person the most powerful man in Chicago…

PART 1 Clara Whitmore had worked for Lucian Varelli for nine years, and in that time she had learned to read the house the way a doctor read a body: not by what it announced but by what it tried to hide. She knew which doors opened without sound on which days. She knew which…