My parents call me so many names I’ve lost track. Little button, cucciola, potato, flower, princess. There was one name they never called me. One that would’ve been more true than all the rest. One that wouldn’t put a candy-coated barrier between truth and reality. A name they would’ve never dared admit was spot-on.

Bait.

That’s what I am. They can dress me up like some kind of doll. They can make my prisons as lavish and luxurious as they want. My parents can shower me with love, affection, gifts, and whatever else they need to ease their guilt. No matter what, I’ll still know I’m nothing more than a shiny bauble dangling at the end of a line meant to snag some worthy suitor who can take over my father’s business.

Once my parents realized they couldn’t have another kid, I became bait. Just a pretty, pointless key to my father’s kingdom, waiting for the day when he finds the man he wants to give me to.

Here you go. This is my daughter. I’ve made sure she’s untainted and pure. Classically trained with impeccable manners. She can play you the piano and sing like an angel, if you want. She knows how to cook and clean. And we’ve made sure to keep her in shape so you’ll have plenty of fun fucking her, too.

I stare out the window of my father’s Rolls Royce and watch the lips of my semi-transparent reflection twitch with disgust. I’m feeling particularly cynical today, probably because my father has been trying to sell me on a guy he wants me to date all week.

“You would like him,” says my father. We sit in the back seat together, behind Franco and Donnie, who are silent, as usual.

My father’s reflection is beside my own in the tinted window. I see the way he watches the back of my head, eyes calculating and hard, even though I know he’ll make a show of softening them when I turn to face him. He’s not the man he wants me to think he is, just like I’m not the girl he thinks I am, but that has never stopped either of us from playing the game. If we stopped pretending, everyday life would be all-out war instead of some kind of cold war. That, or I’d make a futile effort to run away and disappear, only to be snatched up by his men in a few hours.

I turn to face him and find his features softened already.

“I’m really busy this week,” I say. “One of my classes this semester has a lab, so I’ll be there on Fridays, too.

He looks at me with dark eyes shadowed by bags and lines—a product of too little sleep and too many hard decisions for one man to bear. “I’m done asking, Anabella.”

I wear the expression I’ve been taught to wear, no matter what. Calm. Collected. Obedient. Forget the fact that I’m screaming inside, that my hand itches to slap him across his face. I have to be the perfect little mafia princess. It’s my job as much as it’s my father’s job to keep the family running like a well-oiled, blood-soaked machine.

He watches me, waiting for my response until the atmosphere in the car grows so thick I can barely breathe.

“It’s time for you to—”

“I do have a boyfriend,” I say suddenly. It’s a lie, of course, but I’ve always had a bad habit of doing stupid things when I feel cornered—and lying to my father is a stupid thing. A very stupid thing.

My outburst makes my father’s thick eyebrows climb slowly up. Even Franco and Donnie, who sit quietly in the front, suck in surprised breaths. The idea of me having anything—even a pet turtle—without their knowledge was almost unthinkable. Father had Franco and Donnie follow me like overgrown shadows almost around the clock.

“Why am I only now hearing of this?” demands my father. His voice is a deadly whisper, like a cold wind tingling the skin from the base of my spine to my neck.

My heart pounds in my chest like a caged animal. I can’t look at him. I fix my eyes on the back of Franco’s seat, searching the expensive leather for an answer, for some explanation that will let me backpedal out of the lie. My father isn’t a man you lie to. Not even if you’re his daughter. He’s the Don of the Torretti crime family, and men have lost their lives for less than lying to him.

I know he wouldn’t hurt his own daughter, but he might do something worse. He might arrange a marriage for me. I could resist and fight all I want, but he knows as well as I do that he’d win in the end. He has too many resources. Too much control. I’ve had my short leash to find a suitable man on my own time, and now he’s tugging in the slack. I’m not even sure I ever really had the freedom to choose, or if my father only wanted me to think I did to keep me from rebelling.

“I wanted to have part of my life to myself. For once.” My voice is quieter than I want. Too meek and soft, but it’ll have to do.

“Cucciola…” he says, reaching to pat my cheek with his rough hands. His little potato. He and my mother called me that when I was a baby because I was so plump. He only calls me it now when he’s trying to placate me. “You know I’ve given you as much privacy as I can afford. But you’re my daughter. My enemies would use you to hurt me. Even my so-called friends would use you to take advantage of me. I have to be careful with you. If anything happened to you...” He continues, his voice muffling into a dull buzz in my mind.

I nod my head at the right times, waiting through the rhythm and flow of his words that has become so familiar. It’s a speech I’ve heard a hundred versions of a hundred times in my life.

One time too many.

I know I could back out of the lie now. I could just apologize for being silly, maybe. My father is traditional, and he’d accept the explanation that I was just letting my womanly emotions get the best of me. That’s me. Delicate, emotional Ana. Too fragile and important to actually care that she has been in a gilded cage her entire life, for her own good, of course. Look at all the shiny things she has in her little prison! How could she be anything but happy and content?

“I don’t want to meet him,” I say softly. “The guy you’ve been trying to set me up with.”

A pregnant kind of silence follows my words, the kind that tells me my father is not-so-patiently waiting for me to convince him not to explode with anger, that every word I speak might as well be another step along a tightrope.

“I have a boyfriend. I met him in class, and we’ve been mostly texting, but I—”

“Fine,” says my father suddenly. His eyes are narrowed and his lips are curled in the faintest grin, like he’s seeing straight through my sloppy lies. “Text this boyfriend of yours and have him meet you here.”

I raise my eyebrows, mouth open in silent protest as I search for some kind of excuse. “He might be working,” I say.

“Tell him it’s very important. Very important. Life and death, maybe?” He suggests with a coldness in his voice that I’ve never heard him use with me.

My throat feels suddenly dry, like it’s full of dust. He’s threatening me. I’ve always wondered what it would take to push through the facade of happiness he prefers to put up between us. I wouldn’t have thought it could come crumbling down so easily.

“Okay,” I whisper, pulling out my phone and typing a text to a random guy I worked on a group project with last semester, because it’s one of the few male names on my contacts list, and my father is leaning in closely to watch. I type out something cryptic about really, really needing him to meet me at the coffee shop on 15th.

“Life or death,” reminds my father with a smile that doesn’t touch his eyes.

I swallow hard, but my throat is so dry it just makes a clicking sound.

Once I send off the text, I lean back and stare out the window, trying not to breathe too heavily.

“This boyfriend of yours. Matt, was it?” he asks.

I look at him, confused, at first, until I realize he read the name of my partner when I was sending the text. “Matt. Yeah,” I say quickly.

“What does he look like? So we know when he has arrived.”

I strain my panicked brain to think of some vague description. “His hair is kind of brownish, but I guess in the right light you might call it dirty blonde. And sometimes he has a little scruff on his face but sometimes he shaves it clean.”

My father waits for more with raised eyebrows.

“He has, uh, blue eyes?” I ask. “Blue eyes,” I say again more firmly.

“I see,” he says. “I would have thought with all the time you spend writing those silly stories, you’d be able to describe him more clearly.”

I look down at my lap, fidgeting with my fingers. One minute, I was in the middle of an annoying argument I’d had with my dad a million times, and now? Now I’ve managed to fire the first bullet in a cold war, to push all the hostility between my family and I into the open with a stupid lie.

The worst part is I’m not sorry. Disappointing my father feels like trying to make myself breathe underwater. I’ve been trained and conditioned my whole life to make him happy, as if it was my only real purpose for existing. Be a dutiful, good daughter. That was all. My little lie was the first step off the edge of a cliff. It was the scariest part, and now all that’s left to do is enjoy the fall. The ground may be rushing up to meet me, but at least I can enjoy the fall.

The thought calms me a little bit. I watch out the window with my father and Donnie while we watch the coffee shop. Franco comes out a minute later with four coffees and raises one of his thick eyebrows at the tense atmosphere in the car, but doesn’t say a word. He knows better.

I’m beginning to panic when two minutes have passed and nobody has entered the shop but a woman and her daughter. I don’t let my fear show. My hands are in my lap and my back is straight, even if I’m screaming inside for someone to come, no matter what they look like. My description was so vague that the guy pretty much just needs to have a penis and not be bald. I doubt I can string out this little lie of mine for long, but I can only take so much of my father’s speeches and pressure.

I roll my lip between my fingers while my brain plays catch up with my lies. Even if my father does believe me, which I seriously doubt, I’d still need to pick a random stranger and convince him to pretend he’s my boyfriend. I can’t decide what scares me more, my father’s wrath when he realizes I was lying, or the idea of approaching a man I don’t know with such an insane request.

None of this stupidity is going to do anything but prolong the inevitable. I know that. I do. But I bet a drowning sailor would still suck in one last huge breath, even if it only meant they’d buy themselves a few seconds before they drowned.

I mentally pass on the first few guys who walk into the shop. One is too old to be believable. One has a toddler in his arms. Another has a beard down to his waist and tattoos up his neck. Then there’s a long stretch of minutes where no more guys go into the shop. Panic buzzes through me when I realize I’ve been too picky. If I let this drag out much longer, my father is going to stop humoring me. I have to pick the next guy. No matter what.

The next guy comes a minute later, and I’d swear on a bible that time slowed down when he rounded the corner, just like some cheesy movie, except there was nothing cheesy about him. Tall, broad, and sinfully well-built with a glare to melt glaciers. His hair is so dark I’d almost hesitate to call it dirty blonde, but there are some hints of gold in it, while his beard is almost all dark brown. I chew my lip as I watch him pass, hoping he’s going to go inside the coffee shop, even if I’m probably way too chicken to even begin making eye contact with him, let alone asking him to pretend to be my boyfriend—whatever that would even mean. He’s not wearing a wedding ring, at least, but that hardly does me any good when he’s so far out of my league I’d probably get a nosebleed from standing within ten feet of him.

He pulls open the door to the coffee shop and walks inside.

“That’s him?” asks my father.

“Yes,” I whisper. I realize a second too late that I spoke out loud, instead of in my mental fantasy where that man was asking if I wanted to be tied to the bed or blindfolded. “Yes,” I say again, more firmly. “That’s my boyfriend.”

Oh boy.

I push the car door open and climb out, feeling like a baby giraffe learning to walk for the first time. My arms and legs feel so stiff and awkward that I almost call the whole thing off and confess to my father, but I know where that road leads. His punishment would be to fast-track me into this mystery man’s arms, to lock me away until the arrangements could be made for the wedding. Even if I only believe this stunt is going to do about as much good as an umbrella in a hurricane, it feels good to be doing something.

I step out of the car and follow him into the shop, painfully aware of the boring, simple dress I wore to make my mom happy for our family dinner. She never likes me to dress in anything ostentatious or remotely sexy, so I’m wearing a completely out-of-fashion dress with a floral print that makes me look like I belong a few decades in the past. Then again, I’ve spent most of my life trying to scare guys away, to buy time before I have a chance to live up to my real purpose. Before someone takes the bait.

The coffee shop has big glass windows, which means my father will be able to supervise every part of this little charade from the car. The car is a black Rolls-Royce Phantom and the windows are tinted completely black—a few shades darker than what’s legally allowed, but one perk of being in the mafia is that it gives my father a level of immunity with the cops, so long as he keeps the bribes coming.

I find the guy standing in line with his hands thrust in his pockets. He’s wearing a suit and tie. I briefly try to figure out what job he might have as I approach. I run through several opening lines, each worse than the last, before I decide the best plan is the simplest plan. Just explain what’s going on, admit you know how crazy it sounds, and wing it from there. Also, pretend like you’re not about to have a heart attack, an asthma attack, and a seizure at the thought of talking to this guy.

“Excuse me?” I say, touching him lightly on the arm. Jesus. Even the light touch against his arm feels somehow sexually charged, like I can feel the heat emanating from his skin beneath his clothes.

He turns, taking me in and flashing a smile that catches me off guard. His eyes are a shocking blue, and a scar cuts horizontally across the bridge of his nose that somehow makes him look even sexier. If I thought he was out of my league before, getting closer to him and seeing that smile only convince me how completely and hopelessly outmatched I am. I should’ve waited for a guy I had a remote chance with.

He fixes his eyes on me, watching me more intently and with more interest than I think I’ve ever been watched. Having those eyes like blue-hot flames focused on me is my first taste of his drug, and it’s the moment I know there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to be his. No boundary I wouldn’t shatter. At the same time, a kind of cold hopelessness grips me in the chest. He’s going to laugh me out of the shop. Worse, he’s going to look at me like an idiot and take his eyes off of me for good. He’ll have forgotten any of this happened within seconds.

Just do it, Ana. Grow some balls.

“This is going to sound completely crazy, but…”