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

Chapter Seven — The Man Behind the Desk

The study was enormous.

That was the first thing: the sheer size of it, the sense of standing in the hull of a ship. Bookshelves to the ceiling on three walls, filled not for display but for use — cracked spines, paper slips, volumes pushed back unevenly the way books go when somebody actually reaches for them. Heavy velvet drapes. A fire roaring in a hearth big enough to stand in. And a smell, warm and strange: beeswax and cedar and whiskey, and under it the faint green edge of rain coming through a door left open on a terrace.

And behind a mahogany desk the size of a dining table, a man rose to his feet.

Maren had spent the drive north building a picture. The picture had been made of her sister’s words — thug, gunpowder, cheap cologne — and of everything she’d ever read about men who ran syndicates, and it had been, she realized later, entirely and completely wrong.

The man was elegantly dressed. Tailored midnight-blue suit, unbuttoned; no tie; a shirt that had been cut for him and not for a rack. His hair was dark and swept back, and his jaw looked like something a sculptor had gotten right on the first try and then been afraid to touch again. He was tall and broad, but he moved — she saw it in the way he came around the desk, and filed it, because her mind filed everything — with a kind of economy, no waste, as though every motion had already been decided an hour before it happened.

It was the eyes, though, that made the hair rise along her arms.

They were black. Not brown-with-a-hint-of-black; black, the deep flat black of a well at night, and they took her in with an attention that had no politeness in it at all. He looked at her the way she looked at a set of books that wouldn’t balance.

“Mr. Vescari,” Maren said.

And then: silence.

She had rehearsed certain things on the drive. She had decided she would not beg, would not flatter, would not explain herself, and would not — this had been important to her — would not apologize for her own face. She had decided she would say what she was there for and let him do what he was going to do. She had made herself a small, cold speech.

But the speech died in her throat, because the man behind the desk was not doing any of the things she’d braced for.

He was staring at her.

Not glaring. Not recoiling. Not reaching for anything. He stood with one hand resting flat on the desk, and he stared at her, and the silence grew, and the fire popped, and the rain came down on the terrace outside, and it went on for so long that Maren’s breath began to come short and the foyer cold seeped up through the wet hem of her dress and settled in her bones.

Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen.

She had walked into a hundred rooms in her life where people looked at her and then looked away. She had built her entire personality in the space between those two events. And now she was standing in a room where a man with a syndicate at his feet was looking at her the wrong way, and she could not identify the expression at all, and the not-knowing was worse than anything she had prepared for.

She lifted her chin. Her hands were shaking. She spoke.

“I know what I look like,” she said quietly. “I know what this is. My father and my sister sent me because they thought a man like you would be insulted by a face like mine. They were betting you’d throw me out into the driveway before midnight and renegotiate the debt on better terms, and if that’s what happens, that’s fine — I’d rather you do it quickly.” She swallowed. “So. If you’re going to send me back, send me back. If you’re going to hurt me, do it now. But I’d like to know which, because I’ve been in a car for three hours and I would like to sit down.”

The man behind the desk did not answer.

He set his glass down — a soft clink against the wood — and he came around the desk, and he crossed the room to her, and he did not hurry. Maren’s body decided before her mind did; she took a step backward and her back came up against the oak of the doors, hard, and her breath went out of her, and she had time to think one clear thought: here it is.

He stopped a foot away. He was close enough that she could smell him — cedar and rain and something warm, whiskey and skin — and close enough that the fire behind him went dark, blotted out, the way a window goes when a body steps in front of it.

And then he raised his hand.

Maren flinched. She screwed her eyes shut, the way she had learned to do at nine, in the years when Vivian’s hands came at her face with questions. Her shoulders came up. Her whole body made itself small.

Nothing happened.

Nothing happened but a thumb. Warm, calloused, astonishingly light, laying itself along her left cheek and drawing — slowly, unhurried, with a kind of attention that was almost unbearable — down the line of her scar.

Maren’s eyes flew open.

Nobody had ever touched her scar. Not once, in fifteen years. The doctors at the hospital had touched it, when it was a wound; her mother would have touched it, if her mother had lived. Everyone else in her life had trained themselves to look at the other side of her face, so thoroughly that she had come to feel that the left side of her head belonged to someone else entirely — a stranger’s face she carried around for a family that had agreed not to see it.

The man who ran the east coast’s shipping and extortion, who had killed people and had their bodies weighted and sunk, was tracing the ruined side of her face with his thumb, and his eyes were not full of disgust, and they were not full of pity.

They looked — and this was the part Maren could not process, that she would turn over in her mind for weeks — reverent.

“Disgusted,” he said at last. His voice had dropped to something low and rough. “That’s the word you used. That they thought I’d be.”

“Y-yes,” Maren whispered.

He hooked one finger under the bridge of her glasses and lifted them off her face.

The room went soft at the edges. She blinked at him in the blur of the firelight, and she felt more naked than she had ever felt in her life — her one defense removed, held now in a stranger’s hand, a stranger who turned them over once, curiously, and dropped them onto a leather chair without looking.

“Why,” the man said, “would I be disgusted by the only real thing in a family of plastic cowards?”