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  A sharp cramp drew her belly taut and she braced herself against the door to keep from doubling over. No. Not now. Please not right now. “Hush, little baby,” she murmured. The pain wrapped around her like a hot cummerbund and she fell against the door. She started pounding with both fists. “Hank! Please open the door! The baby . . . I think he’s coming.”

  A distinct shuffling came from inside the study and her mind brightened. Oh thank God! I couldn’t coax him out with stew, but at least he’ll do it for the birth of his son. The lock disengaged from the inside and the heavy maple door opened a crack to reveal candlelight and a distinct but familiar odor of sweat and bodily waste. But she couldn’t see Hank in there. A trickle of fear dripped down from her heart and burned in her gut. Another contraction followed, but she felt it only distantly compared to her mounting worry.

  “Hank? What are you doing in there?”

  A shaky whisper issued through the crack. “Come in, Lady. Come see what I’ve done. It’s wonderful.”

  But she didn’t want to go in there. Hank had never invited her in before, and she couldn’t blame him. It would be like inviting someone into the darkest corner of your mind, where every passing thought of murder and revenge and madness gathered like dust bunnies with teeth. “Sweetie, not now. I need you to come out if you can. The baby—”

  “Fuck the baby! Come in here now!” His voice cracked under the strain. Then, softly, almost a whimper: “Please, Lady. I need you.”

  Lady’s world broke into prisms as the tears spilled over. He’d truly lost his mind. It had only been a matter of time. The doctors all warned them it might come to this one day if he didn’t get stay on the medication or try other therapies, but neither of them wanted to believe it could end up this way. They thought they could manage it, and they’d done quite well at it for a while. She had to call two doctors now, though. Hank’s first, then hers. Oh, this was not how she wanted things to be. Not at all.

  She backed away from the door and hit something that grunted. Lady shouted and turned around to see Kali standing there in a sari the color of blood. Another contraction rushed forward, and this one obliterated all shock at seeing the nanny she’d hired, unexpected. Uninvited. She felt a pop and warm fluid gushed down her legs, pattering on the expensive rug.

  “Kali, help me!” she cried, no longer questioning why the woman was there, only needing the help of someone who hadn’t gone crazy.

  “Do not worry, Mrs. Ballas. Your husband called me here. I will care for your son.”

  “What? Called you? I don’t understand.”

  Another contraction doubled her over. The pain was constant now and excruciating. World-eating. She had read all the books and practiced for her labor, but nothing could have prepared her for this kind of pain. This didn’t feel right at all.

  “Take me to the hospital, Kali. I’m in labor, but something is wrong.”

  Kali’s eyes, which had been so warm at their meeting, were now like unyielding black stones. “There is no time. We must do it here.” She took Lady by the wrists and started guiding her toward Hank’s office, pushing the door open to reveal the menagerie of lit candles on nearly every horizontal surface. Terror was an icicle through her belly. “What are you doing? Kali, no!”

  Another contraction. This one buckled her knees, making her certain her stomach was going to split down the middle like a rotten melon. She hit the rug, immediately smelling urine. A lot of it. The sensation of dampness on her hands soon followed and she realized this was Hank’s toilet. He’d been peeing on the carpet like an untrained animal for days. This was not like him. Not at all. Hank had never been so unsanitary. What she saw next, however, obliterated all other thoughts, even the pain, at least briefly. Illuminated by candlelight were the ropes Hank had installed to help himself move around when he was weak. He’d strung them up near the ceiling, from wall to wall like a web. He was sitting in that web, gazing down at her with an empty grin. “Hank? My God, what is this? What have you done?”

  “I found the source of all the filth, darling. The floor! I no longer have to touch it! Isn’t that wonderful? I’ve never felt more free!” The shrillness of his voice belied the presence of any sanity.

  The next contraction was like an ax to the gut and she fell forward as if praying to Allah, pressing her forehead into the urine-soaked rug. More warm fluid ran down her legs and she felt something stick into her neck, like a bee sting. She looked up to see Kali holding a syringe.

  “What is that?” Already she felt her body going limp and numb. The pain of her labor was still there, but growing further away as whatever drug Kali had injected her with went quickly to her brain.

  “Something to dull your pain,” she said.

  “Drugs? I don’t want drugs.” But already she was feeling more docile and she couldn’t deny how nice it was to have something to dull that awful pain even a little bit.

  Kali gently rolled her over onto her back and she was greeted by the sight of her husband’s face hanging several feet above hers. He’d dangled himself by the ankles from his web like an emaciated, albino spider. His eyes were glassy and insane and hungry. Lady’s mind began to detach like a blimp from its mooring. None of this felt real. “Why are you here?” she asked. “I don’t understand.”

  Kali stroked her hair back from her forehead. “Your husband knows something about your child that you do not, Lady. I am very sorry, but I do not think you could bear it.”

  In spite of the drugs, Lady’s heart skipped a beat. “Hank, what is she talking about?”

  “He’s a poisonous lad, darling. Quite poisonous indeed!” Back and forth he swung from his rope nest, madly gleeful about the whole nightmare happening below him.

  “There are very severe defects,” Kali said. “Your doctor hid the ultrasounds from you.”

  All of the terrible words and the horrible pain coated her brain like mud. “How could you know something like that?”

  “I work for Dante still. He knows more than I do.”

  Hank barked out laughter. “Remember the vitamins I gave you? They weren’t really vitamins, but oh the millions we’re making on this little venture, dear! Industries will pay nearly anything for the chance to research actual pregnant women.”

  “Enough of this! You’re both insane!” She tried to sit up, but her body was no longer taking orders.

  “You are bleeding very heavily, Lady. We must get him out now.” Kali’s voice was low and soothing, but her face yielded nothing.

  “No, get my doctor! Call an ambulance. Please!”

  “There is far too much blood. Your placenta has likely ruptured.” The crimson sari hooded the woman’s face, but Lady could see the whites of her eyes with their coal irises, and they were not the warm, maternal ones from the nanny interview. They were cold and driven, and they likely no longer saw Lady as human. “We must take him out right away.”

  “Yes, cut it out! Release the filth! Release it!” Hank cried. Or at least the ghoul that used to be Hank. Lady finally understood something. The horrible things he’d allowed on his wife and child had driven him over the edge.

  Lady heard a metallic scrape and a shiny blade gleamed in the dimness, but Kali’s movement was too swift and Lady’s medicated brain was too slow to make a connection between the blade and the woman’s intentions until the eight-inches of curved steel came back up again lacquered with blood. And then, finally, the pain flooded in, overriding the drugs and bringing the certainty that her belly had been ripped apart and set ablaze. The agony made the contractions seem almost quaint. Every system in her body began misfiring. Her vision doubled and then trebled. Her ears began to ring, and her skin flushed with the jabs of a million searing needle points as Kali dug around inside her for what felt like hours but must have only been seconds. The pain was so enormous, even with the drugs, it seemed almost separate from her, like a vivid nightmare she was watching happen to someone else. But even then she didn’t realize the truth of the agony, the horri
ble and oh-so-personal robbery taking place, until the room filled with the high-pitched squeals of what could only be her baby, and she reacted as any new mother would, with a swoon of joy and love and relief, even though she knew she would be dead soon.

  “It is a boy, Lady. Congratulations,” said Kali, her voice shaking.

  He was tiny and so very thin and pale in the woman’s hands. A gooey mixture of blood and amniotic fluid dripped from his gangly white limbs. Something was definitely wrong with him. Lady could sense it not only in the way the child’s skin seemed gelatinous and translucent, or how his tiny ears came to points, or the way his skull looked lumpy and badly formed. It was in Kali’s face, dawning with horror as she gazed down at the newborn.

  “What is it?” Lady heard herself ask, though from a distance as the world began to gray around the edges. She was no longer cognizant of her own body being butchered open. Her mind was on her child. “What’s wrong with him?”

  Slow regret and terror filled Kali’s eyes. “As I said, you would not be able to bear it.”

  “Show him to me. Now.” She wanted to speak with more force, but the energy wasn’t there for her anymore.

  After a bit more hesitation, Kali turned the child around so Lady could look upon his face. Terror sucked the air from her lungs and reality shrank to the size of a pinpoint as she screamed at the thing that had been living in her womb all these months.

  “What is this? Oh my God . . . what did they do to him?” The baby screamed and quivered as Hank screeched more laughter overhead. Its eye, she thought. It was the last clear thought Lady had as she grabbed onto the encroaching darkness like a life raft and let it carry her away to oblivion.

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  CHAPTER 1

  Nina’s Last Trick

  She sat before the Madam’s desk, legs crossed, hands clasped in her lap, chin pointed toward her chest. Normally she would never be so demure, but the Madam frightened her. Maybe it was the woman’s hair, a barely tamed flame-red nest of curls threaded with silver, or the hard red slash of her mouth set in flesh that resembled carved ivory. Mostly, Nina thought, it was those chipped diamond eyes. They reminded her of the frost that formed around the inside edges of her room’s window during the winter months. At least the Madam kept her own office nice and toasty. She was a miser with the heat in the rest of the house; you just had to fuck harder if you wanted to stay warm.

  It was her second time in this room. The first was four years ago, her face puffy in the places Victor Cassini’s thugs used their fists. She’d sat in this very same chair, soaked through with late autumn rain and shivering, partly from being cold and wet but mostly from her mad craving for a bump of coke. From that night on, she hadn’t taken anything stronger than the generic aspirin the Madam doled out to the girls if they were sore from a particularly rough client. All the ladies of the Weeping Willow were bound to a strict drug-free policy. They were merchandise, after all, and high quality earned top dollar. Part of her would always be relieved to be free of the hold drugs had on her. They had, after all, gotten her into this mess. But she still wished she could have something to obliterate her memories of the all the terrible men she’d been forced to pleasure over the years, men with poor hygiene, calloused hands, and uncaring eyes that only saw her as a tool for getting off.

  She just had to remember the Madam offered her a second chance at life, for what little it was now worth. Anything less than effusive gratitude and humility was punishable by the Madam’s own particular brand of torment. Nina had a few scars to prove it.

  She hadn’t been alert enough on that long ago night to examine the Madam’s inner sanctum in much detail, but she got a good look now, and what she saw soured her stomach. Oil paintings of nude men and women in erotic poses dominated the space. The one hanging directly behind the Madam’s desk depicted a man’s naked back and buttocks in stark relief as he plowed into the wide-eyed redheaded mistress below him, his hands gripping her wrists like fleshy handcuffs. The artist might have intended for her to look lost in ecstasy, but she came off more as frightened and non-consenting. Nina shuddered, despite the fire roaring in the room’s enormous fireplace.

  She could barely detect the house’s perpetual salty reek of sex and sweat in here; the Madam attempted to cover it up with some sort of woodsy incense or potpourri. The deep red paint on the walls reminded Nina of the times clients would pay extra to slap her around a bit, leaving behind welts the same shade. But none were as rough as the Madam, who was now sitting on the opposite side of a mile-wide mahogany desk, looking at her like a farmer sizing up a hog before the slaughter.

  “How are things, Nina darling? You look healthy.” Her voice was a seductive purr that snaked around Nina’s head like wisps of cigarette smoke. It was easy to be seduced by that voice, lulled into complacency.

  She pondered the Madam’s question. How were things, anyway? Well, she was about as happy and healthy as an indentured sex servant could be, but she would never say such a thing aloud. She narrowly missed a trip to the bottom of the harbor four years ago, and she was one or two wisecracks away from going there now. The only reason she was even at the Willow was because a made guy in the Cassini crime family liked the way her tits looked when she was tied to a chair. And she’d been tied to said chair because that same made guy caught her and her boyfriend robbing one of the family’s stash houses Queens.

  It had all been Joey’s plan. He was a runner for some low-level crooks in Jersey who knew about a cash drop coming in that night, and he was sure they could pull it off, pay off their dealer, and earn a little more favor with a local capo. Joey was always hungry for a way into the Cosa Nostra life. His head was all messed up by the mob movies he binge watched while high. Stealing from the mob had never been part of Nina’s Great Life Plan when she stepped off the bus with the dust of Des Moines still in her hair and the lights of Broadway in her eyes. Becoming a drug addict and the girlfriend of a Sopranos wannabe had also not been part of the plan, but she managed both of those within the first six months. It was a real achievement, even with her family’s lowlife pedigree. The best her mother could manage was collecting disability checks while earning under the table wages at a local greasy spoon.

  Joey had been the spark that led to her downfall, though. They met while she was dancing at a shitty club in Red Hook. After that, she stopped working altogether and fell into his way of life. Her nights were soon filled with sex and rails of coke in a tiny room—which was actually a walk-in closet in a rundown Brooklyn loft where six other guys lived—where a lamp and a deflated air mattress were his only worldly possessions. He was so very “New York,” with his scruffy hair, his east-coast accent and swagger, and she was instantly hooked, both on the drugs and on him. He could have convinced her to fly to Rome and rob the Vatican, but now he was dead and she was stuck here in some limbo between prison and death. She would have preferred either over this.

  “Nina, dear?” The Madam snapped her fingers. “Are you still with me? I hope I’m not boring you.”

  Nina shook her head. Bad time to fall into a daydream. “Sorry. I was just thinking about the last few years, I guess. I’m doing all right, though.”

  The Madam smiled, and Nina’s stomach curdled a little. Some faces just weren’t meant for smiles, and when the Madam did it, she looked like an alligator in a human suit.

  “I’m happy to hear it. The clients have been quite generous in their opinions of you. Money talks, and your receipts have told me all I’ve needed to know. You’re a real asset here at the Weeping Willow, which makes me almost regret to say that you’ve nearly paid your debt to the family.”

  Feeling like someone had loosened an overly tight corset around her midsection, Nina let out an audible sigh. “That’s great, Madam. Thank you.” She’d known this moment was approaching, because she kept meticulous records ever since she started opening her legs, but she was afraid to hope. In the movies, you never got away from the mob. The game was ri
gged every single time. But these people operated a little more legitimately, she supposed. Business was business, and far less interesting than the movies. She’d earned back what she’d taken, plus interest, and now it was almost time to go home. If someone told her five years ago that she would yearn for the sight of Des Moines and the inside of her mother’s dumpy trailer, she would have laughed and then snorted another line or two.

  “I’ve put in a word with Victor about your status here,” the Madam said. “You’ll be free to go your own way soon, your name wiped clean from his ledger. But allow me to be frank, Nina dear. I’d rather you didn’t go. We’ve all come to appreciate your talents here. I would make it worth your while with the compensation, of course. I would double your current take, and I would give you a larger room. But most importantly, I would help you would stay out of the trouble that brought you here.”

  Stay here? The idea sounded so absurd she nearly snickered, but that would have been suicidal in her current company. Nina knew she wasn’t the first to receive such an offer. Many of the girls who lived and worked at the Willow continued doing so long after they were solvent. They had nowhere else to go but down. But Nina wasn’t like that. Compared to the abuse, homelessness, and drug problems a lot of the Willow girls came from, her home life had been like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. She was dirt poor and the trailer lacked in warmth—Janie Quick was never a doting mother, and the misery of lupus had only made her meaner over the years. But none of that mattered now.