She spent three years hiding her identity in Chicago, but one innocent hum exposed her connection to the mafia family’s darkest secret.

The back exit of the Rossini Club opened into an alley that smelled of cold fat, wet concrete, and the salt lake two miles east. Rain was beginning to fall—not hard, but in that thin, greasy Chicago mist that made the cobblestones look like wet coal.

Ana stood under the tin canopy of the service entrance, her hand still holding the heavy brass door handle. Her heart was beating with a rhythm she had forgotten she possessed: hard, shallow, and fast, like the wings of a trapped bird against a window pane.

She had three thousand dollars in a hollowed-out paperback copy of The Count of Monte Cristo under her mattress on North Clark Street. She had a forged social security card that belonged to a girl named Hannah Vance who had died of pneumonia in Idaho in 1994. She had two suitcases, three pairs of comfortable shoes, and an absolute rule against looking back over her shoulder when she walked through a crowd.

For three years, that had been enough.

Now, she took a long breath of the cold air, feeling the dampness hit her lungs.

Move, she told herself. Don't go back to the changing room. Leave the apron. Leave the black shirt.

"You left your coat, Ana."

The voice came from the shadow of the dumpster six feet to her left.

She didn't jump. People who spent three years waiting for the floor to give way under them rarely jumped. They simply turned around to see what form the weight had taken.

It was not Nico. It was the younger of the two men who had been sitting with him—the one with the silver signet ring on his right pinky and a faint scar that cut through the edge of his left eyebrow, dividing the skin like a seam.

His name was Marco. She knew that because three months ago she had served him a espresso at the diner on 22nd Street where she worked the morning shift before coming to the Rossini Club. He hadn't remembered her then. He remembered her now.

"I don't need it," she said. Her voice was too flat, too stripped of cadence. It was the voice she used when the landlord asked if she had seen the man who lived in 3B before the police came.

"It's November in Illinois," Marco said, stepping into the yellow light of the canopy lamp. He wasn't holding a gun, but his hands were inside the pockets of a dark wool topcoat that fell past his knees, and the fabric was stretched tight over his right hip. "Nico says people who walk out into November without coats usually don't intend to come back."

"I have a shift at the bakery at six tomorrow," she lied. "I was just getting air."

"You don't work at the bakery," Marco said gently, almost sympathetically, as if he were explaining a mathematical error to a child. "You work at the diner on 22nd, you scrub floors at the St. Jude rectory on Thursdays, and you live above a laundry on Clark where the dry cleaning steam comes up through the floorboards every morning at five. We've known where you were for eight months, Elena."

The alley seemed to shrink.

The yellow canopy light hummed above them, a wet insect sound that vibrated through the roof of her mouth.

Elena.

No one had called her that since the night the lights went out in the house in Naples, since the night her father had carried her down to the harbor with two duffel bags full of negotiable bonds and three bullets in his side.

"You're mistaken," she said.

"My mother was a Casaro," Marco said. He took one step closer, stopping just outside her immediate reach. "She sang that same half-step when she was cutting tomatoes in the summer. My uncle hated it. He said it sounded like a goat dying in the hills. But Nico’s father... Nico’s father liked it. He used to sit on the stone wall behind the olive press and make her sing it three times before he’d let her go back inside."

He reached into his pocket. Ana’s shoulder muscles tightened, her fingers curling into the palm of her hand, preparing for the strike she knew she couldn't win.

He didn't pull out a revolver. He pulled out a small, blue plastic stick wrapped in a thin paper towel, the kind you bought at a twenty-four-hour pharmacy three blocks away when the rain was coming down and you didn't want the clerk to look at your face.

He dropped it into her hand.

It was heavy for something made of plastic.

"He found it in the small metal bin in the third floor rest room," Marco said, his voice dropping an octave, losing its dry humor. "The one reserved for the kitchen staff. You didn't push it all the way to the bottom under the paper towels, Elena. You were in a hurry because the chef was screaming about the arancini."

Ana looked down at the stick in her hand.