CHAPTER TEN
francesca
I stepped out of the sleek black car and into a secure, dimly lit back bay of Conall’s building on Vinegar Hill. The last time I had been here, I hadn’t even noticed this entrance—I had been too panicked and consumed by fear after Angelo called me. Now, I observed the heavy steel doors and the armed guards stationed at strategic points, their gazes sharp and unwavering. The precaution didn’t surprise me. Conall had been shot recently after a Vanello hit squad targeted Maxim and his sister as they were heading to their car out front, and clearly, he wasn’t taking any chances now.
We walked through a narrow corridor, the soft hum of security systems filling the air. The atmosphere was stark and utilitarian, sharply contrasting with the luxury I knew awaited above. The entire building had been remodeled at what I assumed was a tremendous expense. My brother was wealthy, but Conall O’Kelly operated on another level, and each step reflected that. He led the way, his strides confident yet tense. He nodded to the guards as we passed, but his jaw was clenched, and his shoulders were taut. The reason he’d brought me here clearly weighed on him, or he was worried that I might try to escape, which seemed unlikely. Where would I go?
The elevator ride to his apartment felt endless, reminding me once again of my fear of enclosed spaces. I leaned further into the warmth of Conall’s body, taking refuge in his strength. He startled at my movement but thankfully remained quiet. Though he wasn’t one to fidget, I caught him drumming his fingers against his thigh — a small tell that made my chest tighten. I would have preferred to go home, pour myself some wine, slip into yoga pants, and curl up in bed rather than traipsing across town. I sighed and wondered when it would be acceptable to call Theo or my brother for a ride—or an Uber.
“You’ve done a lot with this place,”
I said, breaking the heavy silence.
He glanced at me, a fleeting smile crossing his lips. “It needed an update. I didn’t want it to feel like a museum. My sister mentioned it felt cold.”
“It’s nice,”
I said, my voice softer than I intended. “Very… you.”
The elevator doors slid open, revealing the penthouse. I stepped inside and felt my breath catch in my throat. I had never been in this space before. The area featured clean lines throughout, and the muted color palette of whites and grays was accented by deep greens. Floor-to-ceiling windows showcased the city lights, while sleek furniture furnished the open-concept living room.
Typical Conall. Truly gorgeous, even if it was a bit stark.
He led me to the kitchen, opened a bottle of wine without asking for my preference, and poured me a glass. I accepted it, though it irritated me that he didn’t ask. There was no reason to argue when it was clear he’d done his research. It was one of my favorites. I sipped, even though the crisp wine did little to calm my nerves.
Conall leaned against the counter, his eyes fixed on the glass in my hand. He absentmindedly peeled the wine label, his jaw tense. I had known Conall for years and had seen him in a lot of situations. But this? This quiet tension was something new. It unnerved me. I wasn’t sure why he had brought me here. This was private, and I had to resist staring too hard at him, indulging in the rugged beauty of something I couldn’t want. Shouldn’t want.
There were many reasons Conall O’Kelly was off-limits. I’d admit that I’d always had a bit of a crush on him, and I’d even acknowledged that Theo and I had a few panicked discussions after Maxim married Cora O’Kelly. The marriage meant the blood oath was progressing, but Angelo hadn’t mentioned anything about it yet, and we wouldn’t bring it up. Ilias hadn’t spoken to Theo either. We both agreed not to stir up any trouble.
“Why didn’t you just take me home?”
I asked, breaking the silence. “I could have called Theo or my brother.”
Theo would have been my first choice. “If the hospital wanted me to go home to relax, that’s where I should be.”
I gave him a pointed look. There was nothing wrong with me other than being a little freaked out and experiencing some minor soreness from where that jerk had grabbed and squeezed me. I would definitely survive. Maybe a little wine and chocolate. A bath.
He looked up, startled as if he had forgotten I was there. “I thought we’d be more comfortable here—fewer interruptions.
Interruptions? Comfortable? I looked around the pristine space, the air almost too still. This wasn’t my definition of comfort. If anything, I felt exhausted and drained from the experience at the hospital. The last thing I needed was another tense emotional situation, trying to decipher what he wanted. His jaw was tight, and for a moment, it seemed like he wanted to say something.
“Did you have something you wanted to talk about? Is that why you brought me here? Conall, say what you need to say,”
I urged, the tension in my chest becoming unbearable.
Instead, he averted my gaze. “Would you like something to eat? Or perhaps some tea?”
“I want you to tell me what’s going on,”
I said, setting my glass down more forcefully than necessary. “You’re making me nervous.”
The idea of calling a car was tempting, but I wasn’t sure I could manage to leave the building.
His lips pressed into a thin line. He nodded, as if gathering himself. “Alright. But first, sit.”
“Conall…”
“Please, Francesca, sit.”
“Okay, but you need to tell me what’s going on. You’re acting strange. Stranger than usual.”
His jaw tightened, and he looked a bit hurt. I felt a pang of regret. Honestly, I didn’t believe he was strange. Conall was particular about certain things, but he wasn’t strange.
I sat on the edge of the plush sofa, my hands clasped in my lap. I thought about calling Theo, who always knew how to calm me down. She would have the right words and help me see things in a way that didn’t make me feel like I was standing on quicksand.
Conall sat across from me, his posture rigid. He rested his elbows on his knees, hands clasped together. He looked at me for a moment, as if trying to memorize my face. This made me want to scream.
He exhaled sharply, running a hand through his hair. “There’s something you need to know, and I’m not sure how to tell you without…”
He trailed off, shaking his head.
My stomach twisted. “Without what? You should take a few breaths and just say it.”
As I picked up my wine, I took another sip, bracing myself. I couldn’t imagine what he might say. “Is Angelo alright?”
“Yes, everyone is fine.”
I waited, holding my breath while Conall sat back, gripping the armrests of his chair as if to steady himself. “There’s an agreement, Francesca. A blood oath made by our fathers. It’s?—
I cut him off, my voice sharp with irritation. For heaven’s sake. I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or not. “Stop. I know about the blood oath, Conall.”
His head jerked up, his expression stunned. “You know?”
“Of course I know!”
I snapped, rising abruptly. The wine in my glass sloshed perilously close to the rim, so I set it down before I did something dramatic, like throwing it across the room. “I’ve known since I was eighteen.”
Conall blinked, clearly grappling with this revelation. He opened his mouth and then shut it. “I had no idea. You’ve never?—”
“Never mentioned it? What was I supposed to say? ‘Hey, I’m looking forward to being forced to marry someone I didn’t choose someday!’”
I let out a bitter laugh. “Give me a break.”
He now stood, hands raised in a placating gesture. “Francesca,”
“I never wanted to be a wife, so I wasn’t exactly happy when I found out about it,”
I snapped, pacing the length of the room. The earlier tension I had felt had boiled over into pure frustration before I stopped and spun to look at him. “Why are you bringing this up?”
Maybe I should have pretended not to know, but even I wasn’t that good a liar, and I was at the end of my rope today.
His eyes narrowed imperceptibly at me, accentuating the crinkles in the corners. I could guess why he was discussing this with me. However, if I were next on the chopping block, it should be my brother having this conversation with me, and it seemed like the worst possible day for it. Yet, a kernel of relief in my belly unfurled at the idea of Conall being the man I’d be paired with. I’d been terrified it would be Ilias. I liked Ilias well enough, but the thought of him as my husband was something I couldn’t envision. My feelings for him were strictly platonic. He felt like a brother to me, and there was no way I could share a bed with him.
“When we were pressured to sign, we were all very young and not in a position to choose. Angelo confronted your father right at the table. I didn’t know him then, but it doesn’t surprise me now. He got his ass kicked.”
I let out a laugh. It sounded just like my brother getting a beating for something he couldn’t change. Sitting back on the couch felt like a defeat, but I took a spot on the sofa’s edge and perched there. I had never questioned my brother about how the oath went down, but his mark was on the paper, so I knew he had been made to sign.
“We had all been dragged to the meeting,”
Conall continued, his eyes locked onto mine. “Some of us had been threatened, but we all knew we had no choice. Our fathers were involved in bad things. Trafficking.”
His lips tightened as if recalling the event. “The contract was a way for them to force each other into an alliance and guarantee their product.”
“I know about that. Angelo mentioned before that my father was involved in it. He’s worked hard to restore the Santelli name,”
I offered.
My father had been heavily involved in trafficking women before he died. I’d found out about that, too. I was only about seventeen when the first whispers of it reached me. I had been in vehement denial. Yeah, my father was a total a-hole, but he hadn’t reached that level of evil. When I confided in Theo about what I’d heard, she gave me that sad look of hers that she reserved only for when I said something idiotic. Not only did she confirm the rumor, but she added layers to it that I could have done without knowing.
“For years, we believed that the oath was a private affair and not widely known,”
he continued, regarding me with solemnity.
They had thought they wouldn’t have to go through with it. Was that what he was hinting at? I could tell him I didn’t need the saga, but I was curious. I had never gotten the whole story before, and this was a perspective that I might never get to hear. There was no way I’d pass up the opportunity to hear about it.
“We were wrong about that,”
he continued. “Apparently, our fathers were braggarts in addition to everything else.”
The words were bitter as he shifted in the chair. “As you can imagine, the deal excluded some other organizations. Many of the top families on the East Coast were involved in trafficking. They still are when they can evade the law.”
“You aren’t, right?”
I interrupted. I didn’t think he was, but it would forever change how I viewed Conall if he were involved in the flesh trade business.
“No.”
The words were flat, yet his eyes searched mine. “Never. It was one of the foundations of my friendship with your brother and the others. We agreed, when we formed our own alliance, that we would build ours to dismantle the trade lines they had established in those areas.”
He leaned a little closer to me as he spoke, the fabric of his suit jacket straining against the bulk of his muscles. Conall was brute force encased in a fancy suit. I knew he tried to present himself as tame, but there was no disguising what he truly was — dangerous. “My father took me with him when I was just a boy. He called it training.”
His nose wrinkled as he spoke, as if he were smelling something unpleasant.
“Sounds like he wasn’t an easy man,”
I said cautiously. My interactions with Conall were limited, and his dad seemed like a jerk, but I couldn’t just say that. To me, any man involved in such businesses immediately fell into that category, but I’d try to remain polite.
Conall must have had a reason to confide in me now. He always struck me as someone who kept his secrets, so I was surprised by how forthcoming he was.
“No. He wasn’t. He was a slob, a drunk.”
Conall’s eyes met mine before continuing. “A wife beater. Beat my mother to death.”
My breath caught as my heart ached for him. “How old were you?”
I managed to ask.
“Seventeen. I shouldn’t have been surprised when it happened. He was rotten to the core, showing no respect for women or children, for that matter. He traded them as if they were less than a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of his shoe.”
Conall rubbed the back of his neck, appearing uncomfortable with the information he shared, but I couldn’t blame him.
“You killed him?”
I asked, curious if he would respond.
The moment we discovered the contract at the club all those years ago, I experienced a true epiphany. I had been naive until that point. My mother hadn’t made my early years easy; she was quite difficult, but my brothers more than compensated for it. My life hadn’t been hard, and certainly nothing like what Conall described. I was raised with as much love as Angelo and Remo could give me — which was considerable.
However, I realized how naive I had been when I looked at that contract. I had not followed a logical line of reasoning. Clearly, they claimed their father’s positions in their organizations using the most traditional method available: they had killed them. On the night of my eighteenth birthday, I was appalled, but since I had committed my own murder, I had become more forgiving.
“Yes. I found my mother’s body lying there.”
He spoke evenly, yet a storm raged in his eyes. Muscles tensed in his neck and jaw, as if he seethed at the memory. “I could say it was a crime of passion, but that would be a lie. It would have happened anyway. It should have happened sooner so she didn’t die.”
His hands flexed.
“I’m sorry.”
It was all I could offer. I wasn’t sure what I was sorry for: the fact that his mother had died, that he had to be in that situation, or that he had killed his father. I was sorry for all of it.
“I just wanted you to understand.”
He watched me for a full minute, assessing whether I truly understood.
“Okay.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant. Did I really understand him? Did I comprehend the reason he killed his father? Still, I kept my questions to myself. I did understand that his father needed to die. The man sounded like garbage.
“I need you to understand who you are marrying. I don’t want there to be any secrets,”
he stated.
I reeled back. “Marrying?”
I echoed. What on earth was he talking about? I looked at his face for any signs of deceit or indications that he’d lost his mind, but he seemed completely calm — eerily so.
“That’s right. Today.”
His jaw flexed again. “The blood oath is inescapable. You may not want to be a wife, but you will be. It’s not negotiable, especially with all this upheaval that Vallone is causing. It’s dangerous for all of us. You’ll be better protected this way. You’ll be both a Santelli and an O’Kelly. That’s why I needed you to understand the oath.”
He looked away for a moment, rubbing his neck again and grinding his teeth.
He was completely serious. Although I wanted to challenge his logic about everything, I couldn’t. I was a Santelli, but I would be safer as an O’Kelly. The mafia, the mob, and the bratvas all operated under similar umbrellas. Names held power. Two? Well, two is more than one.
Getting up, I walked to the window to gaze over the city while I wrestled with the idea. A blood oath wasn’t something you could shimmy out of. Theo and I had already discussed that. We’d tried to research it as thoroughly as possible (as thoroughly as you could research things like that).
I glanced at my nails, feigning indifference, even though my stomach pitched. There wasn’t much choice here. I understood that as well as he did, but I couldn’t help hating him a little.
After a few minutes of silence, I said, “Fine, I’ll marry you.”