CHAPTER 16

The day was a lazy day.

Lucrecia did not like days like this, where dawn stretched itself into hours and magnified and then overemphasized the garishness of New York, when the sun, finally up, would crawl too lazily across the sky and bathe the entire city in a gold light.

Such a boring colour, gold. The only thing worth noticing about gold was that gold was gold. Only valued because of its name as a material and precious metal. Other than that, the colour gold meant nothing.

It was pathetic. Bland. Who cares that it made every other thing sparkle and feel like royalty?

Lucrecia did not care for such things. There was only ever one thing to bother about. Money, and if not that, then how to make money.

She tossed her head back on the quickly wearing-out sofa in the crammed space she called home.

Less of a house than a box, Lu’s apartment had two doors and looked exactly like she always called it: a shoebox. Quite literally.

One of the similar run-down houses on a block that seemed to