The Silence We Bleed: Dark Mafia Romance by Anya Sugar

VERA

I was never his daughter. I was a payment.

That is the sentence I have been carrying since a Tuesday in January, and I have stopped waiting for it to hurt less.

My father sold me before I was born. Not for money. For a debt six families ran up in 1972, and he spent twenty five years keeping me quiet and useful and exactly where he left me, and he called it protection, and I believed him for a quarter of a century.

Now the man who bought me is coming to collect, and he has been waiting since September.

Everyone tells me to run. My husband has a flat nobody knows about and a passport in a drawer and he would put me on a plane tonight if I let him.

I am not running.

I have read four hundred and eleven items out loud in a room full of men who could not look at me afterwards. I know exactly what this city owes and exactly who it owes, and there is one entry left in the second account and it has my name on it.

So let him come. He has never once had to sit across a table from what he bought.

He wanted a bookkeeper.

He is going to get one.

KIRILL

I have nothing left to put between her and what is coming.

No chair. No table. No men. Everything I built in seventeen years went in one afternoon in November and I have not missed a single hour of it, and now there is a man in this city who has been owed my wife since before she was born.

I have hunted him since January. He has no name, no seat, no face, and he has been inside my house four times.

Every wall I put up, he has already walked through, years ago, before I thought of it.

She will not run. I have stopped asking. She sits at that kitchen table with a notebook and two columns and she is building something, and when I ask her what it is she tells me the truth, which is the most frightening thing about her.

There is one item outstanding in that account.

They can have the city. They can have the account, the reels, the whole rotten arrangement.

Whoever comes for my wife is going to have to come through a man with nothing left to lose, and I have wanted a reason like this since I was nineteen years old.

This is the third book in The Silence Pact series. Reading order:

The Silence We Bury.

The Silence We Break.

The Silence We Bleed.