Brutal Union (The Rosetti Family Chicago #3)

Chapter 1

The wedding dress had been my grandmother’s, my mother’s, and now it would be my prison.

I stand before the full-length mirror in the bridal suite, studying the woman reflected back at me.

Cream silk and vintage lace cling to curves I inherited from the same bloodline that cursed me to this fate.

The dress is beautiful, timeless elegance that should make any bride glow with happiness. Instead, it feels like a shroud.

My fingers clutch the rosary beads hidden in the folds of silk. Mother's rosary, the one she held when she died. The smooth wood grounds me, keeps me from shattering into the thousand pieces I feel breaking inside.

"You look beautiful," Alice says softly from behind me, adjusting the antique veil that cascades down my back. Her hands are steady, but I catch the tremor in her voice. My baby sister, only nineteen, trying to be strong.

"Beautiful enough to seal an alliance." The words taste bitter. "Father must be so proud of his prize heifer."

Alice's reflection meets mine in the mirror.

We both know what this wedding means. With me married to the Irish, she's safe from being bartered away herself.

At least for now. The Bernardi family only has two daughters to trade, and I'm the eldest, the one Father groomed to understand our world even as he denied me any real power in it.

"Mom would be proud of you," Alice whispers, but we both know it's a lie.

Mom died trying to escape this life. Eleven years ago, her car wrapped around a tree on a perfectly clear night, no other vehicles involved. Father called it tragic. I call it murder. She'd been packing when I found her that afternoon, promising to take us somewhere safe. By midnight, she was dead.

Now I wear her wedding dress to marry a man I don't love, cementing myself in the world that killed her. The beads cut into my palm as I clutch them tighter, the only protection I have left.

The memory of another time I pushed too hard surfaces.

Father's lieutenant, questioning my presence at a family meeting.

"Maybe the little princess should go play with her dolls," he'd sneered.

I'd smiled sweetly and asked if he'd learned to count past ten yet, since the books never seemed to balance when he handled them.

Father had backhanded me later, but the lieutenant never looked me in the eye again.

This compulsion to provoke dangerous men is the only time I feel alive in this cage.

Alice finishes with the veil, stepping back to survey her work. In the mirror, we look like opposites. Her dark hair loose and free, still wearing jeans despite Father's orders to dress formally. Me, trapped in generations of lace and expectation.

"Promise me," I say suddenly, turning to grab her hands. "Promise me you'll go to college. That you'll study something that has nothing to do with this family."

"Val…"

"Promise me." My grip tightens. "I'm doing this so you don't have to. So you can have choices. Don't waste it."

Her eyes fill with tears she refuses to let fall. We're Bernardi women. We don't cry where anyone might see. "I promise."

I pull her into a fierce hug, careful not to wrinkle the dress that defines our family's status. She smells like the strawberry shampoo she's used since she was twelve, still my baby sister despite everything.

When we part, I force my spine straight, lifting my chin the way Mother taught me. Never let them see you break, Valentina. You can shatter in private, but in public, you are marble.

The door opens without a knock. Only one person in this family has that privilege.

"Perfect." Father's voice fills the room like smoke, choking and inescapable. The scent of his cologne, expensive and oppressive, makes my stomach turn. Alonzo Bernardi surveys me with the same calculating gaze he uses to evaluate property investments. "The Irish will be pleased."

"I'm sure Liam will be thrilled with his acquisition." I watch his jaw tighten at my tone. "Should I moo for him? Or do you save that for the honeymoon?"

"Watch your tongue, Valentina." He moves closer, adjusting the veil with proprietary satisfaction.

His fingers are rough, careless. "This alliance will change everything.

The Bernardi name combined with Irish muscle.

We'll finally have enough power to challenge the Rosettis' stranglehold on Chicago. "

The Rosettis. Even the name makes something twist in my chest. Not just fear, but something far more dangerous. I think of dark eyes across a negotiation table two years ago, of wine dripping from an expensive suit, of a voice that could freeze hell itself saying, "You'll regret that, principessa."

"Liam O'Brien is weak," I say, watching Father's reflection. "His father runs their organization. Liam just plays at being dangerous."

"Weak men are easier to control." Father's smile is sharp as a blade. "You'll guide him, shape the alliance from within. You're my daughter. You know how power really works."

Yes, I know. Power works by trading daughters like poker chips, by killing wives who try to leave, by pretending love exists in a world built on blood and bullets.

"The ceremony starts in fifteen minutes," Father continues.

"The cathedral is full. Every family of consequence is here to witness this union.

The Morettis, despite their blood feud with the O'Briens.

The Torrentis from Detroit. Even representatives from the neutral territories.

This is bigger than just a wedding, Valentina. This is history."

History. I'm about to become a footnote in someone else's story, the Bernardi daughter who married Irish to forge an alliance. Not a person, just a hyphen between two names.

The church bells begin to ring, deep and solemn, summoning me to my fate. Each toll feels like another bar sliding into place on my cage.

"Time to go." Father offers his arm with the same formal courtesy he'd extend to a business partner. "The groom is waiting."

I take his arm because I have no choice, because Alice needs me to do this, because twenty-three years of being Alonzo Bernardi's daughter has taught me that rebellion only leads to car accidents on clear nights.

But as we walk toward the door, I clutch Mother's rosary tighter and make her a silent promise: I'll survive this. Somehow, I'll survive what you couldn't.

The bells continue their death knell as Father leads me toward my wedding. Toward Liam O'Brien, who thinks he's getting a beautiful bride. Toward an alliance that will shift Chicago's underworld. Toward a trap I can already feel closing around me.

The cathedral stretches before me like a gilded tomb, hundreds of Chicago's most dangerous citizens packed into ancient pews.

The scent of incense mingles with expensive perfume.

I move down the aisle on Father's arm, each step measured and inevitable, my heels clicking against marble that's witnessed a thousand promises and just as many betrayals.

The dress trails behind me, a river of lace carrying the weight of three generations. Grandmother walked this same aisle sixty years ago. Mother, thirty years ago. Now me, completing the cursed trilogy.

Faces blur as I pass. Italian families on the left, Irish on the right, a careful segregation that this marriage is supposed to bridge.

Tommy Torrino sits three rows back, the man who supposedly buried twelve men in Lake Michigan.

Behind him, Patrick O'Brien's enforcer, Seamus Kelly, clutches a crucifix with the same hands that strangled the Kozlov brothers.

The Morettis glare at the Irish across the aisle, their presence here a testament to Father's political maneuvering despite their feud.

My eyes find the stained glass windows, looking for escape in their colored light, but even heaven feels trapped in this place.

Every door blocked by soldiers, every window too high, every path leading only forward to where Liam waits at the altar in his expensive suit, looking exactly like what he is.

Weak Irish royalty playing at being dangerous.

The sharp scent of his nervous sweat cuts through his excessive cologne.

The priest begins before I'm ready, his voice echoing off vaulted ceilings as Father passes me to Liam like I'm a business contract. My stomach turns at the transfer, at being handed over like property with a deed.

"Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to witness the sacred union of Liam Patrick O'Brien and Valentina Maria Bernardi…"

Sacred. I almost laugh. Liam's hand is damp around mine, and I wonder if he's nervous or just drunk. Probably both.

My hands shake so hard the rosary beads click together, a sound that seems to echo in the cathedral despite the priest's droning.

He speaks of love and commitment while my mind takes note of every face I recognize.

Enforcers and assassins dressed in their Sunday best, pretending to be wedding guests instead of witnesses to a transaction.

"If anyone here present knows of any reason why these two should not be joined in holy matrimony, speak now or forever hold your peace."

Silence falls over the cathedral like a blade.

This is ceremony, tradition. No one objects to marriages like mine.

They're planned in boardrooms, sealed with blood oaths, guaranteed by the threat of war.

I hear whispered prayers in Italian, someone crossing themselves, silk rustling as people shift uncomfortably in their seats.

Then the back doors open.

Not dramatically, not with a crash. Just the quiet whisper of ancient wood moving on well-oiled hinges that somehow drowns out everything else. The organ, the whispers, even my own thundering heartbeat.

Marco Rosetti stands in the doorway.

Our eyes lock across two hundred feet of consecrated ground, and time fractures.

My breath catches, not just from fear but from something far more dangerous. The same dark pull I felt when I first met him, that one and only time. The sensation of standing at the edge of a cliff, knowing the fall will destroy me but wanting to jump anyway.

I know that face. Those dark eyes that strip me bare despite the layers of lace, that jaw that could have been carved from marble, that presence that makes grown killers step aside.

Marco Rosetti, the man who inherited an empire at twenty-five and turned it into something that makes other families whisper prayers of protection.

The man I threw wine at two years ago.

The memory crashes through me. His conference room, another negotiation where Father tried to grab territory that wasn't his.

I was twenty-one, furious at being decorative furniture in a room full of men deciding my future.

Marco had looked at me once, dismissing me as irrelevant, and something in me snapped.

The wine was in my hand before I thought about it, crimson spreading across his perfect white shirt while the room held its collective breath.

He hadn't moved. Hadn't flinched. Just watched me with those obsidian eyes while wine dripped onto Italian leather shoes.

"You'll regret that, principessa," he'd said, voice soft as a promise.

Then he'd continued the meeting as if nothing had happened, as if I hadn't just declared war on the most dangerous man in Chicago.

Now he's here, at my wedding.

The cathedral buzzes with tension. I hear the soft click of safeties being released, hands moving to weapons, prayers becoming more fervent.

Every person here knows who Marco Rosetti is.

The man who controls the docks, the unions, half the judges in Cook County.

The man whose family has ruled Chicago's underworld for three generations.

The man whose very presence here is a declaration of something I don't yet understand.

Liam's hand tightens on mine, sweaty and desperate. Father stands frozen behind us. The priest clutches his Bible like a shield.

But Marco only has eyes for me, and in them I see the patience of a predator who's planned every second of this hunt. The satisfaction of a man whose carefully laid trap is about to spring.

He walks down the aisle with lethal grace, designer suit perfect, every movement controlled. Each step brings him closer, and with him comes the scent of bitter citrus, like bergamot, awakening something in me I've tried to bury.

People shrink away from him instinctively.

I see Torrino actually cross himself. Even the Moretti patriarch, who's survived three assassination attempts, edges away.

This is what real power looks like. Not Liam's inherited position or Father's desperate ambitions, but the kind of authority that commands without words, that bends reality through sheer force of will.

My heart pounds against my ribs, terror and that treacherous something else flooding my veins.

I hate that even now, even as he comes to destroy my life, some traitorous part of me thrills at the sight of him.

I glance upward, but even Mother's protection feels fragile against whatever storm this predator has planned.

He stops halfway down the aisle, close enough that I can see the satisfaction burning in his dark eyes, far enough that everyone can see him, acknowledge him, fear him.

"I object."

His voice cuts through the cathedral like a blade through silk, two words that rewrite everything. But then he adds more that make my knees weak:

"She's mine."