CHAPTER 1: THE DRIP OF RASPBERRY COULIS
The crimson drop fell from the tip of my left earlobe, striking the immaculate damask linen of the sweetheart table with a microscopic, wet hiss: *plink.*
It wasn’t red raspberry coulis.
It was venous arterial blood from a ruptured subcutaneous capillary above my zygomatic arch, mixed with whipped confectioner’s sugar and five-hundred-dollar-an-ounce French vanilla buttercream.
The ballroom of the Drake Hotel in Chicago—fourteen thousand square feet of gilded plaster, crystal chandeliers the size of small sedans, and two hundred of the Midwest’s most entrenched private equity executives, appellate jurists, and municipal bond raiders—was not silent yet. It was suspended in that greasy, nervous frequency that precedes an industrial explosion: the clink of silver salad forks against bone china, the dry clearing of throats, the low, robotic chuckle of men who had spent forty years learning how to look away while someone weaker was beaten in the corner.
Luca’s left hand did not leave my shoulder.
His grip was a vice clamped directly over my trapezius muscle, his thumb driving into the nerve junction with three hundred pounds of calculated, domestic torque.
