"You have one hour to pack."

My father couldn't look at me. That's how I knew it was bad, really bad, not just the usual bad of missed rent payments and borrowed money and me covering his shifts at the diner because he was too hungover to stand.

"Pack for what?"

"Adriana." He still wouldn't meet my eyes. "I made a deal."

My gut hollowed out. We were in the kitchen of our cramped Brooklyn apartment, the one I'd been working two jobs to keep since I was seventeen. The one where I'd learned to hide cash so he couldn't find it, to lock my bedroom door when his "friends" came over, to pretend I didn't know what happened behind closed doors.

"What kind of deal?"

He finally looked at me then. My father, Marco Rossi, fifty-two years old, grey at the temples, soft around the middle, with the watery eyes of a man who'd spent his life running from consequences.

"I owed money. A lot of money."

"How much?"

"Three million."

The number didn't register at first. Three million. I couldn't even picture that number. Couldn't connect it to any reality I'd lived in.

"How..."

"Poker. Some investments. It doesn't matter how." He rubbed his face with shaking hands. "What matters is I couldn't pay. And the man I owed, he doesn't accept excuses."

"Then let him break your legs." My voice came out flat. Cold. The voice I used when I couldn't afford to feel. "That's what they do, right? They hurt you until you pay?"

"He didn't want my legs, Adriana."

Silence.

The refrigerator hummed. Outside, a car alarm wailed. Normal sounds from a normal world that was about to end.

"He wanted me."

My father nodded.

"You sold me."

"I traded your debt for mine." He said it like there was a difference. "One year of service. That's all. Then you're free and my debts are cleared and we can..."

"One year of service." I laughed, the sound ugly even to me. "What does that mean exactly? Am I going to be someone's maid? Cook? Or..."

I couldn't finish the sentence.

"He said you'd have your own room. You wouldn't be... mistreated. He gave me his word..."

"His word." I was backing away now, toward my bedroom, toward the go-bag I kept under my bed because I'd always known something like this would happen eventually. "And you believed him. Some mobster promises you he won't hurt your daughter and you just..."

"He's not just some mobster." My father's voice cracked. "He's Cristiano Caruso."

The name landed like a blow.

Everyone in certain circles knew that name. The Collector, they called him. A man who acquired beautiful things, art, cars, real estate, people, and never let them go. A man whose empire stretched from Manhattan to Miami, whose reach extended into police departments and courtrooms and the highest levels of government.

A man who didn't make promises he didn't keep.

Because he never failed to collect.

"You sold me to the Collector."

"Adriana..."

"How long do I have?"

He checked his watch. "Fifty minutes now. His men are coming."

I packed in a daze.

Clothes, practical things, nothing that would make me look like I was trying to appeal to anyone. My nursing textbooks, though I didn't know why. A photograph of my mother, the only one I had, from before she left. My phone charger, my wallet, the emergency cash I kept hidden.

Fifty minutes.

Forty-five.

Thirty.

I thought about running. There had to be somewhere, a shelter, a friend's apartment, a bus to another city. But I'd heard stories about what happened to people who ran from men like Caruso. Not to the runners. To their families.

My father was weak. Pathetic. A failure in every way that mattered.

But he was still my father.

Twenty minutes.

I heard the buzzer. My father's muffled voice, then footsteps in the hall.

I stood in the center of my room, the room where I'd done homework and cried about boys and dreamed about escaping this life through education and hard work and being good.

So much for good.

"Miss Rossi?"

The voice came from my doorway. Deep. Professional. I turned to find a man in a black suit, not Caruso, too young, probably an assistant or a guard. He had a calm face, which surprised me.

"I'm Luca. Mr. Caruso sent me to escort you."

"Do I have a choice?"

"I'm afraid not." He said it gently, like that made it better. "But I can promise you'll be treated well. Mr. Caruso is... particular about his arrangements."

Particular. That was one word for it.

"My bag." I gestured. "I have one bag."

"Of course. Take your time."

I didn't take my time. I grabbed the bag, walked past him, walked past my father who was wringing his hands in the kitchen saying something about calling and visiting and seeing me soon.

I didn't look back.

Outside, a black car waited. Town car, probably armored. Luca held the door open and I slid inside, into leather that smelled like money.

"Miss Rossi." The voice came from the seat beside me.

I turned.

And looked into the eyes of the man who now owned me.

The lobby had been marble and silence. The alley beside the building, where Luca had walked me from the curb, had smelled like rain and garbage. I'd been crying when the car door opened. He'd seen that. I was sure of it.

He wasn't what I expected.

I'd imagined someone flashy, gold chains, slicked-back hair, the Italian-American mobster aesthetic from a hundred bad movies. Instead, Cristiano Caruso wore a simple charcoal suit, no tie, his dark hair shot through with silver at the temples. He was older than I'd pictured, mid-thirties, with a face that would have been handsome if it wasn't so completely, utterly still.

Grey eyes. Cold as winter. They tracked across my face, my body, my bag, cataloguing everything without a single change in expression.

"You're taller than I expected," he said.

Of all the things I thought he might say. "I'm five-five."

"Your father is short. I assumed you would be as well." He turned away, looking out the window as the car pulled into traffic. "The penthouse has been prepared. You'll have your own quarters. A lock on the door that only you control."

"How generous."

His lips twitched. Almost a smile. "It is, actually. Most men in my position wouldn't bother."

"Most men in your position wouldn't buy women to settle debts."

"No. They'd kill the debtor and be done with it." He turned those grey eyes back to me. "I gave your father his life. In exchange, I took something he valued more than himself."

"I'm not sure he values anything more than himself."

"Exactly." His expression flickered, curiosity, maybe, too quick to catch. "You understand him better than he understands you. That's rare."

I didn't respond. Didn't trust my voice.

The car moved through Manhattan, heading toward the glittering towers of Midtown. Outside the window, normal people lived normal lives, walking dogs, buying coffee, complaining about traffic. None of them knew that a woman was being driven to her new cage just a few feet away.

"You're not going to fight." It wasn't a question.

"Would it matter if I did?"

"No. But it would change the terms of your stay."

I looked at him, really looked. His hands were folded in his lap. Perfectly manicured. Perfectly still. Hands that had learned to control every impulse, or bury them so deep they might as well not exist.

"What are the terms?"

"Simple. You stay in the penthouse for one year. You don't contact your old life. You don't try to leave. In exchange, every debt your father owes is erased, and at the end of the year, you're free to go."

"That's it? I just... stay?"

"You stay." His voice was soft. Patient. "What happens beyond that is up to you."

The way he said it made my skin prickle.

"Meaning?"

"Meaning I won't take anything from you that you don't give freely." He turned to face the window again. "But I should warn you, Adriana, I'm a patient man. And I always get what I want."

The car stopped.

I looked up at a building that pierced the sky, seventy stories of glass and steel. The kind of building that made the sky look small.

"Welcome home," Cristiano Caruso said.

And the door opened onto my new life.