Send the Ugly One, He’ll Reject Her! They Laughed — But the Mafia Boss Was Speechless!

Chapter Twelve — The Name on the Door

The next three weeks were the strangest of Maren Ashcroft’s life, and she would remember them, later, as the period in which she stopped being a person and started being a project.

It began with the suit.

On the Monday after the Cayman discovery, two women arrived at the compound from Milan. They arrived, Maren learned, because Lucian had called someone in Milan on Sunday night and said four sentences, and by Monday afternoon there was a rack of clothing in the corner room with Maren’s measurements on a card, and a small, terrifying Italian woman named Bianca who walked around her in a circle twice and then said, in English, “The shoulders are extraordinary. Who told you to hide them.”

“Nobody told me anything,” Maren said. “That’s how the hiding worked.”

Bianca looked at her for a long moment.

“Then today we begin,” she said.

The first thing they did was burn the dress.

Not symbolically — actually. Bianca had it taken out to the courtyard behind the kitchen, and Ines lit a fire in the burn barrel they used for the garden waste, and the three of them stood there in the cold while the olive-green dress with the teeth-buttons and the high collar caught, and curled, and went up in a column of smoke that smelled like a closet and gasoline. Maren watched it burn all the way down. She did not feel triumphant. She felt, mostly, the specific queasiness of a person watching something that had once been inside her body cease to exist, which is a strange thing to feel about a dress, and she filed it away with everything else.

Then the clothes came.

Bianca put her in charcoal first, then deep ink, then a burgundy the color of an old wound, then green — a green that was nothing like hospital corridors, a green like the underside of a leaf in a dark forest — and each time she came out of the dressing room, Bianca would look at her and then at Lucian, who was standing at the window with a glass and had been standing at the window with a glass for two hours, and Lucian would say a single word: “More,” or “No,” or, twice, “That one.”

On the fourth day, the makeup artist came.

She was French, and very good, and very kind, and she began the way they always began: she wet a sponge and reached for Maren’s left cheek with a silicone-based concealer the color of a plausible lie.

Maren flinched back so hard the chair rocked.

“Non, non, non—” the artist began, and then there was a sound from the doorway, and both of them turned.

Lucian was standing there. He had been on his way somewhere; he was holding his phone; he had stopped.

“Out,” he said.

“I’m sorry, sir, I only—”

“Not you.” He jerked his chin at the artist. “Out.”

She went, quickly, and pulled the door shut behind her, and the room was very quiet.

Lucian came over. He did not sit. He stood in front of Maren’s chair and looked down at her, and then he reached out and took her chin between his thumb and forefinger — a little roughly, the way a man handles a thing he intends to be careful with anyway — and he tilted her face up, turning it slightly to the left so that the firelight fell full along the line of the scar.

“Look at me,” he said.

She looked at him.

“Say what you’re thinking.”

“I’m thinking,” Maren said, and her voice came out tight, “that it’s fine, and that I’m being stupid, and that the woman was only doing her job, and that if I’m going to be in a ballroom in six weeks with three hundred people looking at me I should probably not look like—”

“Like what.”

“Like this.”

“Like what,” Lucian said again, and he had not taken his hand off her chin, and his eyes were exactly as black as they had been the first night, and his voice had gone very low.

Maren’s eyes stung. It was absurd, and it made her furious, and she said, in a voice that cracked in the middle: “Like a girl who got a windshield. Like a broken thing somebody put back together badly. Like a face a family keeps in a drawer.”

Lucian let go of her chin. He straightened up. For a moment she thought he was going to walk out, and she began — she realized with a shock of self-loathing — to plan for how she would feel about that.

Instead he said: “Two years ago I killed a man named Andrei Sobol.”

Maren blinked. “What?”

“I shot him in a garage in Revere and I stood there while he bled out, and I stood there for a reason, and the reason was that the last thing he was ever going to see was my face. I wanted him to die knowing who did it. That’s not sentiment; it’s policy. It’s how this business works.” He said it flatly, without any performance of menace, the way another man might describe annual maintenance on a car. “Four months before that, a man in Brooklyn tried to take a piece of the docks. Two years before that, my father was shot in the back of the head at a restaurant in the North End while my mother was in the ladies’ room, and I was twenty-seven years old, and the first thing I did when I got to the hospital was sign a form that put eleven men under my authority, and the second thing I did was learn to sleep with a gun in a drawer.” He paused. “Do you know what I’ve never once done, in thirty-two years?”

“No,” Maren said.

“I’ve never once been hidden.” He looked at her. “I’ve been despised. I’ve been feared. When I was a kid, before the money, I was nothing — I grew up in a house with three rooms and six people and a father who never once looked at me with anything except calculation. But nobody in my life ever put me in a drawer, Maren, because I was never a thing they could put away. You were. For fifteen years, you were. And you have decided — I know you’ve decided, because I’ve watched you decide, I’ve watched you in that boardroom — that the way to stop being a thing in a drawer is to become the person who opens drawers.” He leaned down, and his voice dropped so low that she felt it in her chest. “That’s not how it works. That’s how I work. That’s not what you are.”

“Then what am I,” Maren whispered.

“I don’t know yet,” Lucian said. “You haven’t shown me. You keep taking the paint and wiping it off before anyone can look.” He straightened. “Here’s what I know. That scar is the only thing on your face that’s about you instead of about your family. It’s the only thing you own that they didn’t buy, and every single person in that house has spent fifteen years trying to make you understand that it’s the reason you’re worthless, because if it’s not the reason, then they threw away the best thing they had for no reason at all, and that is a thought they cannot survive.” He turned toward the door. “So when you walk into a ballroom full of people, you will walk in with your hair back and your face bare, and they will look at the scar, and they will look away — every one of them, out of pity by reflex — and the whole ballroom will spend the evening not looking at you. And that is how the room will tell you who in it is worth knowing.”

Maren sat in the chair with her hands in her lap.

“And the ones who don’t look away?” she said.

“Those are the ones who can see,” Lucian said, and went out.