I wasn’t about to forgive Ewan for killing my father just because he bought me some nice clothes, but if I was going to stay in this prison, at least I was going to do it in comfort.
He came to me one afternoon while I brushed my teeth after lunch and knocked on the doorframe. “I need you to get dressed,” he said.
I looked down at myself. I had on yoga pants and a tank top. “What’s wrong with this?”
“As much as I love your ass in a pair of tights, we’re going to see the Don,” he said.
I went very still and rinsed out my mouth. My mind raced wildly—this was the Don that ordered my father’s death. It was the Don that was in a war with the Healy family. He was the man truly responsible for all my suffering, all my pain and my anger. And I was about to be placed directly in front of him.
“What does he want?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from trembling, but couldn’t quite manage.
If Ewan noticed my discomfort, he didn’t show it. “I don’t know,” he said. “Dean called and told me to come to the house and to bring you.”
“What house?” I asked.
“They have a mansion in Mt. Airy,” he said. “Far north of here. They have other places in the city, but that’s where we’re going.”
I put my toothbrush down and leaned against the sink. Of course these gangsters had a mansion in Mt. Airy, where else would they live? This was so absurd and I could barely believe that I was drifting through this world. I felt like it was happening to someone else on my little TV.
“What should I wear?” I asked, and felt dumb for saying it.
He smiled a little bit and shrugged. “Something nice. I can pick it out for you, if you want, but you’ll have to try it on while I watch.”
My cheeks flushed. “No thanks,” I said. “Asshole.”
He laughed and walked off to his room. When the door clicked shut, I hurried to get dressed.
The Don wanted to see us. I didn’t know what the head of a powerful crime family wanted with me, but I knew this wouldn’t be good. He was testing Ewan by using me, and I could barely understand all the strange, intersecting connections between us. He spoke about his mother, and said she was related to the Healy family by marriage, in the same way that I was distantly related to them. I could understand that the Don might worry that Ewan would turn to his mother’s side in all of this, but then again, I wasn’t sure if his mother was alive at all.
Most of Ewan remained a mystery to me. There were no personal photographs around the house, and he always kept his bedroom door shut and locked when I went out. He never left a phone around, or his laptop, or anything that could give me some information about him. All I knew was what he told me, and that wasn’t very much. His life seemed sad and quiet and lonely, and he had almost no friends, aside from Dean. He spent a lot of time out around the city, and left me alone for hours at a time. When he was in the apartment, he watched sports and looked at his phone and listened to music, and sometimes he read old science fiction paperbacks.
I tried to avoid him, but it was hard, since we were living together. I sat with him a couple of times on opposite ends of the couch. We didn’t talk, and it was a strangely comfortable silence, like he didn’t need more from me than I was willing to give.
And yet as I changed into a decent pair of jeans and a dark blue button-up top that fit me just right, I thought about his eyes when he walked in on me naked, the way he stared at my body, and seemed hungry. I’d never seen a man look at me like that before, but it was pure lust, dripping with desire.
Later on, he touched me, and his fingertips left an indelible mark on my skin, like an electric burn. It felt good, and it scared me all at once.
My clothes must’ve been acceptable, since he nodded once and smiled at me when I joined him in the living room. We got into his car and headed north, driving with the windows down. I had a million questions about the Don, about the family, about Ewan and Dean and everything, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask them.
The city turned into the suburbs. Mt. Airy was an old neighborhood, and most of the houses were Victorians built in the twenties and thirties. The Don’s place was at the end of a long driveway, set back away from the other houses on a plot of land that took up the entirety of a residential block.
The house was a light brown with green accents. A large tower stood up on the left side, the peak looming above everything else. A porch wrapped around the bottom with wooden floors and gleaming metal accent pieces. The windows were large and dotted the front, and there were at least three floors. It stretched back and out of sight, and it was the biggest house I’d ever seen in my life.
Ewan parked and killed the engine. “Try not to talk,” he said, squinting up toward the front door.
“Excuse me?” I asked, bristling slightly.
“The Don is very old world,” he said. “Women are better seen than heard in his mind, and you’re a captured enemy. If he addresses you, respond to him, but otherwise smile and don’t talk.”
I ground my jaw. “I’m not a fan of that toxic masculinity bullshit,” I said.
“And I’m not a fan of watching the Don’s soldiers beat you to a pulp for speaking out of turn,” he said, looking at me with a straight, serious face. “So make
