Page 1 of For Your Eyes Only
PROLOGUE
GIANA
Obsession killed my mother, but it’s not how I will die.
The detectives called it acrime of passion, but she would’ve hated that verdict. She adored passion and colors and beauty and music. She taught me to love these things. She taught me to sing and to sew and to dream…
“Your mother was a great beauty.” Aunt Graziella jerks my head as she attempts to pull a comb through my thick, gnarled curls, forcing a yelp from my lips. “You are not like your mother.”
I don’t cry. It’s true, I’m not beautiful like my mother was, but I try to be strong like her.
My mother would walk through the streets of our small, coastal village in southern Italy with her silky brunette hair shining in the sun. Her skin was smooth as the delicately carved ivory plaques of Mary and the baby Jesus in the cathedral, and when she passed, the men would lean back, closing their eyes like they smelled fresh bread straight from the oven.
They would follow her along the narrow streets, hoping to pick up something she dropped or to help her carry a heavy load—all to see her smile and perhaps even saygrazie.
My olive skin was tanned brown by the sun, and my aunt would rub lotion on me saying I’d never attract a man with the way I looked. It only got worse as I got older, and she said I looked like a peasant with round hips and a full bust.
But I wasn’t looking for a man.
When I was ten years old, a man took away the life I loved, a life of happiness in which my mother and I lived in a pretty little apartment overlooking the sea. A man killed my beautiful mother, and then he killed himself. And I was sent to live with my aunt.
My father died in a fishing accident before I was old enough to remember him. He gave me my love of dancing and running around the streets barefoot, which made my heels as rough and calloused as a donkey’s hooves, as my aunt would say.
I started dancing when I was thirteen, and to everyone’s (mostly my aunt’s) surprise, I was very good at it (for a girl my size, she would say).
I wasn’t as slim as a reed, but I could dance well enough to draw the attention of the city company. I was talented enough to be paired with a boy as light on his feet as I was, a boy who asked me to marry him and then broke up with me—but that came later.
The memories I cherish are the ones I spent with my mother, sleeping with the windows open so we could breathe the salty sea air. I would close my eyes and dream of lifting my arms and riding higher on the warm currents, my stubborn curls flowing straight in the cool breeze, the stars illuminating my skin from the inside like a goddess.
My mother once told me butterflies work very hard to become the beautiful, flying creatures that kiss all the flowers. She said their metamorphosis happens when they’re not even expecting it.
She said caterpillars root in the dirt and leaves, dreaming of nothing, when all the time, deep inside they have the power to become magnificently gorgeous creatures that can fly.
I wrinkled my small nose and asked if she was calling me a worm.
She laughed and hugged me close. “What do you love, Gia?” She threaded her fingers in my wild curls until they were smooth coils around my cheeks. “Follow what calls to you, and that’s how you find your passion. Then spread your wings and fly.”
Then she was gone, and I was left with no one who believed I was special.
She made it sound so easy—believe, work hard, fly. I didn’t know metamorphosis was dangerous and cruel. I didn’t know how easily everything could go wrong.
I only thought it created a beautiful butterfly.
I didn’t know it also brought death.
CHAPTER1
TRIP -TEN YEARS LATER
“You’re out of control, Mother.” I exhale, straightening the lapel on my dark brown, Brioni suit.
Agitation itches beneath my virgin wool collar, but I don’t let it show. I never let my irritation show. I study the Manhattan skyline through the oversized windows of our Upper East Side apartment and collect my thoughts.
At twenty-five, I’m well-connected and highly invested in the obscenely wealthy shadows of the city’s real-estate, gaming, and nightclub scenes. I operate on the razor’s edge of what’s legal and what’s, shall we say,morally gray.
Players from around the globe operate in my world, and high-priced lawyers use many words to construct the shady legality of our deals. The margins are thin. At any moment, someone's number could come up, in which they discover they owe more than they can repay.
Such things don’t happen to me.