"Everyone Laughed When She Stepped Forward—Until the Mafia Boss Realized She Was Gifted

Two weeks later, the snow began to fall over Manhattan, dusting the limestone cornices of East 74th Street with a layer of clean, quiet white.

In the sunroom at the back of the Moretti mansion—a large glass pavilion overlooking the walled garden where the bare pear tree stood—a new drawing table had been installed.

It was made of solid birch, adjustable to three different heights, equipped with professional-grade illumination lamps, bins of imported Faber-Castell colored pencils, heavy watercolor pads, and three dozen pairs of blunt-tipped scissors in various bright colors.

Lily sat on a high wooden stool, wearing a green woolen sweater and clean navy-blue trousers. She was drawing the sparrows that landed on the snow-covered wall outside the glass.

Elena stood nearby, folding a stack of freshly laundered linen towels. She was no longer wearing the gray uniform of a domestic agency; she wore a simple, elegant dark dress. Her employment file at the agency on 34th Street had been officially closed with a generous pension settlement, and she was now the sole administrator of the Moretti Family Educational Trust.

Dante entered the sunroom quietly, carrying a flat cardboard box tied with a yellow silk ribbon.

Lily turned around on her stool. When she saw Dante, she laid her pencil down neatly in its groove.

“Did you buy new ties?” she asked.

“No,” Dante said, walking over to the birch table. “I don't wear ties in the house anymore.”

He set the box on the table in front of her. Lily pulled the ribbon loose and lifted the lid.

Inside was a leather-bound sketchbook with thick vellum pages, and resting on top was a pair of custom-made steel shears with small, rounded tips, their handles enameled in bright turquoise in the shape of two leaping dolphins.

Lily picked them up. The steel was cool, perfectly balanced for her small hands, sharp enough to cut clean through cardstock but rounded at the tip so she could not hurt herself.

“They're from Germany,” Dante said, leaning his hip against the corner of the table. “They won't break if someone steps on them.”

Lily looked at the shears, then up at Dante. “Are the men in the black van still outside?”

“No,” Dante said. “They went away. They won't come back.”

“And the man with the silver ring?”

“He went to Italy,” Dante said smoothly. “He decided he preferred the country.”

Lily nodded once. She did not ask further; with the uncanny perception that governed her mind, she had likely already calculated what happened to men who left their rings behind.

She placed the turquoise shears on the edge of her new sketchbook, opened the first blank page, and picked up a charcoal pencil.

“What are you going to draw now?” Dante asked, watching her small hand prepare to move.

Lily looked out into the garden, then toward the long corridor that led to the front entrance of the mansion—the house that now belonged to her as much as to the man who commanded its guards.

“The front door,” Lily said simply, her pencil touching the vellum with absolute confidence. “So I can see who is coming before they ring the bell.”