The cash drawer clicked shut at 1:47 in the morning, and the numbers still didn't add up.

Eighty-nine dollars in singles and change, plus the wad of twenties I'd skimmed from the register. Sofia's conchas sat wrapped in pink boxes in the display case, waiting for a pickup that would never come if I couldn't figure out how to stop the bleeding.

The sign over the door read Pan y Luz. Bread and Light. The light part had been in short supply all month.

My phone buzzed. Benji: I need to talk to you.

Not asking. Never asking.

I was wiping down the counter with a rag that smelled of lemon and old flour when the bell over the front door chimed.

"We're closed—"

"I know what time it is."

I looked up.

The man filling the doorway was wide in a way that made the whole room feel smaller. Expensive suit. A watch that cost more than my oven. Grey threading through his black hair. And a smile that told me he'd already done the math and liked the answer.

"Elena Vargas." He said my name like he was tasting it. "Ricky's girl. I heard you kept the bakery."

"Who's asking?"

"Sal Gallo. I handle accounts for friends of mine. Your brother's become a very valuable customer."

The words dropped into my stomach like stones into deep water.

"Benji paid you on Thursday."

"He paid Thursday's vig." Sal leaned his bulk against the counter, and the wood groaned. "The principal's still on the books. And as of tonight, it's doubled."

The old refrigerator hummed. The desert heat pressed against the storefront windows like something alive.

"His debt was twenty thousand."

"His debt was twenty thousand," Sal agreed. "Now it's forty. The man I work for in Chicago doesn't like waiting. Money's got to move."

Forty thousand. I'd be dead and buried before I could bake that.

"I'll pay it," I said. "Just give me a month."

"You'll pay it tonight." His voice didn't change, but something behind his eyes did — flat, patient, certain. "Or you'll pay it in a way that settles it permanently."

He looked at me then, slow, from the flour dust on my forearms to the scar through my eyebrow to the way my hands had started to shake. And he smiled again.

"You're a pretty thing, isn't that the funny part? Pretty bride settles all debts. That's the arrangement."

The sentence didn't make sense at first. Then it did.

I took a step back. "Get out of my bakery."

Sal's men were already at the door. Two of them, dark suits, one pulling a knife to clean under his thumbnail like he had all the time in the world.

"Saturday," Sal said. "The Little White Dove. You show up in something white, sign your name next to mine, and your brother's problem goes away. Nice and clean."

"Diosito santo," I breathed.

"Careful with that mouth, mija. You'll have a husband to obey now."

The crash came from the back.

Not the front — the back. The alley door that led into my flour room. Something heavy slammed against it, once, then again. A man's voice, low and ragged, swearing in a language I didn't know.

Sal's men went still.

"Check it," Sal said.

I moved before my brain could catch up. "No — don't. It's my oven. The door drops when the heat's too high." I was already walking backward toward the kitchen, wiping my hands on my apron. "It's fine. I'll take care of it."

Sal watched me. Long enough that I felt the weight of it like a hand on the back of my neck.

Then he nodded, slow, and turned back to the front. "Saturday, Elena. Wear white."

I kept walking. I did not run. I did not look back.

The flour room was dark and smelled of yeast and dust. The back door hung cracked on its hinges, a sliver of alley light cutting across the floor. The latch was broken.

And pressed against the shelving unit, half-hidden behind a sack of flour, was a man.

Bleeding. His white shirt was dark from collar to hip. His hand pressed against his ribs, and the other hand held a gun. In the low light I could see a fine silver scar splitting through his left eyebrow — and his eyes. Grey. Pale as smoke. Watching me like I was the most dangerous thing in the room.

Behind me, boots on the linoleum.

I grabbed the burlap tarp off the cart and threw it over him, then dragged a sixty-kilo sack of flour against the shelf so it walled him off from the doorway. He went still underneath.

"Ay, bendito," I whispered. "Stay quiet. Please."

The boots stopped in the doorway.

"What's in here?"

"Flour." My voice came out steady. I don't know how. "Sixty-kilo sacks. You want to catalogue them, it'll take all night."

The man in the doorway laughed, short. "Cute."

I felt him look around the room. The seconds stretched like warm dough.

Then the alley door swayed, creaking on its broken latch, and I saw him notice it. He exhaled, low, and turned away. The boots retreated down the hall. The front bell chimed.

Silence.

The burlap stirred. The stranger got to his knees, slow, wincing, the gun still in his fist. Blood seeped between the fingers pressed against his side.

"Who were they?"

"Someone I owe." The words came out thin. "Someone I'm supposed to marry on Saturday."

He stared at me. Then he laughed — a hard, broken sound with no humor in it.

"Yeah," he said. "I know how that goes."

I should have called the police. I should have thrown him into the alley and locked the broken door and pretended the last five minutes had never happened.

Instead I knelt in front of a dying man with a gun and asked, "Are you going to bleed out on my floor?"

"Not if I can help it." His eyes dropped to the scar through my eyebrow, and something in his face shifted — recognition, maybe. Kinship. "You have one too."

"It was an oven."

"Razor wire." A ghost of a smile. "I've been running from worse."

I pulled a clean apron off the hook and pressed it against his side. His hand came up and closed over mine. Warm. Callused. Steady in a way his breathing wasn't. On his right pinky, a platinum signet ring caught the light — something coiled, watching.

"Marry me."

The words landed like the crash at the back door.

"What?"

"Tonight." He said it low and quick, like a man used to making decisions in the dark. "Whatever you're running from, it dies at the altar. I've been running from worse."

"Running from what?" My laugh came out hollow. "I don't even know your name."

"Dante." He said it like a gift and a lie in the same breath. "Dante Rossi. And by dawn, if you want it, your husband."

The blood had soaked through the apron and gone warm against my palm. He was watching me, measuring me, still holding my hand like it was the only anchor left in the world. The signet ring pressed into my skin. Coiled. Patient. Waiting for my answer.

My father's voice, from a lifetime ago: Mija, when a man shows you who he is, believe him.

A stranger with a gun, a broken latch, and blood on his hands had just asked me to marry him. I'd have to be out of my mind to say yes.

By dawn I'd be a married woman. I only hoped the stranger beside me wouldn't get us both killed before the ink dried.