My Father Sold Me to the Man This City Fears
by Nadia Voss
He didn't take me because my father owed him money. He took me because a wife can't testify — and I'm the witness the whole city has been looking for since I was nine.
My father lost four million dollars that was never his to lose, and at my sister's engagement party he settled the debt with me. Everyone in this city knows what Ilya Sokolov does to people who owe him. Nobody warned me about what he does to people who know something. Because he didn't want a payment and he didn't want a bride — he wanted the only living witness to a killing seventeen years old, and a wife cannot be made to testify against her husband. The trouble is I don't remember what I saw. And the man who does remember has been raising me since I was nine.
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