Bruno came up off the wheel arch with his rifle still on the young man's chest."There's nobody here by that name, you idiot. You're standing in front of Don Camilla, and she runs every street on this side of the river. Say it right or I'll put you down where you stand."Camilla didn't hear a word of it. Her rifle was still pointed at his chest, but her arms had gone loose, and the barrel was drifting off him an inch at a time.Nobody had called her Callie in all these years.Callie was the name the sisters had written on her file at St. Brigid's. Camilla was the one she'd built on top of it so nobody would ever find the girl underneath.Six people in the world knew the first one. "How do you know my orphanage name?"Her voice came out wrong, and she heard it happen, and every man behind those cars turned to look at her. "Were you in there too?"Tyler shrugged. "We can talk about all of that later."Another burst came in off the north road and blew the wing mirror off the car above th

The bolt hadn't finished sliding home before she turned around.Camilla hit him at a dead run and got both arms around his chest and squeezed like she was trying to break his ribs. "You're here."Her whole body was shaking against him."You're actually here. My Tyler. My little toddler."Tyler stood there with his arms out to the sides for a second. Don Camilla of Sapphire City had her face buried in his shoulder and was sobbing into his shirt.Then he put his arms around her and held on.She was crying so hard she couldn't get a word out for a full minute. Her fists were knotted in the back of his shirt. Every few seconds she squeezed again, checking he was still solid."Nine years, you little swine. Nine whole years.""I know.""I paid informants. I threatened clerks. I put a man's hand in a drawer once because he told me your file was sealed."She pulled back and grabbed his face in both hands."And you turn up in the middle of a gunfight in a cartoon shirt asking me to make you di

The limousine door opened and Annika Salvatore stepped out onto the carpet.She stood six feet tall barefoot, and her heels were adding another four inches to that. Dark red dress, bare shoulders, black hair all the way down her back. The crowd at the barrier made a sound like something had been taken off them."That's the Salvatore girl!""Look at the height of her. She's like something off a mountain."Four hundred cameras turned away from the doors and went off in her face.Annika was used to it and she walked past all of it, and then about ten feet from the entrance she stopped dead.There was a young man at the gate with four security men closing in around him.She knew that face. She had driven that face six hundred miles out of an ice prison eleven days ago, and she had watched him raise a wave of water out of a juice box and wash fifty armed men down a road.Annika changed direction and walked over."What's going on here?"Dewey turned around and his whole body changed shape.

Dewey knelt on the red carpet, holding his arms together and shaking so hard his teeth were going.It wasn't only the whip. His forearm was laid open, and his face had swelled up red as a tomato where she had hit him, and neither of those was why he couldn't stop shaking.Tyler Grant was Don Camilla's date.Dewey said it out loud to nobody at all. There's no version of this world where that was possible.Dewey had spent eleven years on that door learning to size up a man in three seconds, and he'd put this one down as a beggar. He had offered him leftovers at the service entrance. He had promised to put him face down on the road in front of six thousand people.The kid in the cheap shirt was the date of the woman who ran half of Sapphire City.Beside him, Rodney Cooper had gone the colour of a dead fish."Oh, God. Oh God, oh God."His father had one standing rule and had said it to him so many times that he could hear it in his sleep.Never go near Dorian Vex. Never go near Don Camill

Tyler pulled the fried chicken toward him and kept eating, but he ate with his eyes on the doors Camilla had gone through.Her remaining men had noticed her leaving too.Twenty of the goons in dark suits stood up from tables across the front of the room and drifted in until they'd made a loose ring around Tyler, facing outward.Nobody had told them to.A heavy man with a shaved head spoke to the others without turning round."Don Camilla brought him home tonight. Whatever he is to her, nobody gets near him until she's back.""He's more than a guest," said the man beside him. "She walked him in on her arm, and she bolted her door with him behind it last night. Do the math.""I did. That's why my mind is made up."Tyler heard every word and went on eating. Twenty gangsters had decided he was their future boss, and the only thing he wanted from them was that they stayed out of the waiter's path.Across the ballroom, Annika Salvatore was having the worst night of her year.Her grandfather