Chapter Two
Vincenzo
SHE’S A FIRECRACKER, I’ll give her that, squirming and wriggling about on my shoulder while she screams in my ear. I have to tighten my grip on her to stop her from falling, which would very much ruin the performance I’ve just given back there in the cathedral.
Kidnapping isn’t normally something I take a personal hand in—I leave that to my men—but this one was a special case and it required my presence.
I timed it perfectly, even if I do say so myself.
I entered just as the ceremony was starting and everyone’s attention was on the bride and groom.
With the crowd distracted and the Salvatores’ security poor, it was comparatively easy to get into the cathedral, though I have to admit that I didn’t intend to put hands on Caterina Salvatore myself.
She stood at the altar, very tall and straight in a strapless, ivory silk gown that billowed around her like a cloud. Her long black hair had been piled on top her head in complicated curls, with a jewelled tiara crowning her, green eyes glinting at me from behind the silk of her veil.
The little girl I remembered from all those years ago was now a woman, and one who held herself like an empress.
I was expecting her to scream or at least to cower as I strode down the aisle towards her, yet she did neither.
She was, in fact, furious, which I hadn’t anticipated, since her wedding was one of necessity, or so my intel had informed me.
Yet there was no denying the glitter of rage in her eyes, which made me wonder if she actually had feelings for the Bianchi boy.
Not that it matters. I would have taken her even if she was madly in love with him.
Still, it’s interesting that he was the one cowering before me in fear, not her.
No, she basically flung my lack of manhood in my face, and while I’m very much secure in that manhood, the one thing I can’t resist is a challenge from a pretty woman.
It added to the theatre of the moment, so I wasn’t averse to flinging her over my shoulder—except I’m regretting that now as she screams curses in my ear.
Clearly she didn’t expect me to take her up on that challenge.
I stride down the steps to the waiting car, deafened by her continued shouting.
She’s certainly not the good, quiet Salvatore princess I was led to expect by my sources, nor does she bear much of a resemblance to the terrified little girl I shoved in a closet all those years ago.
No, she’s more a wildcat not wanting to be caught, which is unfortunate since I’ve now caught her.
By the end of the day, she’ll be my wife and then I’ll have the perfect hostage to the Salvatores’ good behaviour and that of their allies.
After my mother, Elena, died in a car bomb set by Salvatore soldiers, my father, Stefano, wanted the entire Salvatore family dead in revenge.
But he failed. Now he’s gone and I’m head of the family, my goal is to get rid of them in a different way.
By marrying their last heir and making her an Argenti.
The Salvatores and their friends are the last hold-outs, the last few families I have yet to bring under my control, and once Caterina is wearing my ring, they’ll at last be brought to heel, making the Argenti clan the most powerful of the cosa nostra families in Sicily and Italy, if not all of Europe.
I have a reason for that, naturally enough, and it’s not just about power.
It’s about the stain on the Argenti family honour, the stain put there by my father and his brutal killings of innocents.
A stain I partially erased when I took him down myself, but there’s more still to do.
It’s not enough that he’s dead. I have to change things completely, end the violence.
Unite the families, stop the feuding and the vendettas, stop the killings of family by family, and to do that I need them brought under my rule.
Whether they want to be there or not.
I’m tired of the constant march of death and violence, and I will not have it, even if I have to perpetuate a little death and violence myself. The end will ultimately justify the means.
Though, ironically, it was the death of my mother and the Salvatores themselves that began this crusade of mine.
I was my father’s good little soldier back then, and when he ordered me to take some men and hit the Salvatore family, avenge my mother’s death and the stain on our family’s honour, I obeyed without question.
She’d once been bright and beautiful, a loving mother to me, but over the years, marriage to my father drained the life out of her, turned her into a husk of the woman she’d once been.
A woman who preferred lying in a darkened bedroom with her pills to being with me.
Even so, her death was a shock and I was desperate to make someone suffer for her loss.
Yet once I got to the Salvatores’ villa, everything changed.
Giovanni Salvatore must have had a warning that we were coming, because he was in the middle of escaping when we arrived.
I got a shot at him, but it wasn’t a kill shot, and he unfortunately got away.
Some of my men went after him, while I took the rest into the villa to get rid of any remaining Salvatores.
The men took the downstairs, while I went upstairs, and that’s when I found her. A little girl of no more than five. The Salvatore daughter, Caterina.
I was young, only twenty, yet already battle-hardened. Already wrought into the hard-line successor my father wanted and needed me to be, and I didn’t expect this to be a hard task—I’d killed men before, after all.
But this wasn’t a man, this was a child, and a child, it turned out, was different.
She’d had a doll in her hand and the biggest green eyes I’d ever seen, her long black hair in braids.
And she was terrified of me. Up until that point in my life, my father had taught me to have no morals and no boundaries except obedience to his will.
Yet looking into the little girl’s terrified eyes, I found I did, in fact, have morals and boundaries.
I could not kill a child. She was blameless, an innocent, and while my mother had been innocent and blameless, too, killing this girl wasn’t going to bring her back.
Even at twenty I didn’t have much of a soul left, not after my father took over my upbringing.
Still, I had enough of one to understand that if I killed this girl, there would be no going back, not for me.
I would become my father entirely. It was in that moment I knew that I didn’t want to be.
I didn’t ever want to be a man who put his own revenge above a child’s life.
So I shoved her into a closet, ordered her not to make a sound, then I locked the door.
I went back downstairs, fully intending to stop the killing of Claudia and her son Alessio, my father be damned, but by the time I got down there, the rest of my men had already carried out my father’s plan. Both were dead.
Stefano punished me for my ‘failure’ and I still bear the scars, but even so, it was then that I’d decided. Those scars would serve as my vow to end the killing of innocents. End the violence of family against family.
Caterina Salvatore was the catalyst for that vow, and it’s fate that delivers her into my hands now. She’s the last piece I need to bring the families into line and once that is done the jigsaw will finally be complete. The families united under one law: mine.
Satisfaction settles in me, the way it always does when a plan goes completely to my design, though it would have been more ideal had she not been screeching in my ear like a banshee.
To make matters even more uncomfortable, I can feel the softness and heat of her body draped over my shoulder, the warm scent of jasmine releasing as she struggles.
I’ve always liked the smell of flowers, yet it’s disturbing how much I like hers, mixed as it is with a musky, feminine note uniquely her own.
I almost regret making her my wife in name only, but it’s merely a passing thought and not enough to change my mind.
I have no patience for seduction these days, let alone seducing a woman I once rescued as a child and who sees me as the enemy.
It’s not as if I don’t have many lovers anyway.
She lands yet another fist on my back as I approach the car, striking me as if she has no conception of who I am and what happened to the last person who laid a hand on me in anger.
What she should be is grateful that I decided on marriage as the way to bring the Salvatores and their allies to me, instead of gunning everyone in that cathedral down.
That’s what my father would have done. My consiglieri was doubtful of the plan, since leaving anyone alive is not without its risks, but I wanted to do it without bloodshed.
Dio, I’m in danger of fucking growing a halo.
My driver has the door open for me and as I’m stuffing the wildcat inside, she manages to land a glancing blow to my temple with one flailing hand. My driver goes for his gun, but I shake my head and wave him away. She’s no threat to me, lucky blow or otherwise.
She inhales sharply as I shove her into the seat then jerk the seat belt across her, buckling her up even as she tenses, ready for another round. Safety first for my future wife.
‘You were a lot less trouble when you were five, gattina,’ I tell her.
‘Bastard,’ she spits as the car pulls away from the kerb, the rest of my men following in other cars behind us. ‘I’m not a little cat. And you didn’t need to throw me over your shoulder like a sack of bloody potatoes! I would have come quietly.’
‘Would you?’ I give my temple a theatrical rub. ‘I’ve killed men for less than that blow you just gave me.’
She glances at my forehead then back at me, not an ounce of contrition in her emerald gaze. ‘Kill me then. I should have hit you harder.’
‘My,’ I murmur, amused by her fire. ‘So bloodthirsty.’ And it’s strangely refreshing. I can’t remember the last time a woman was so furious with me, or at least not so openly. People tend to tread lightly whenever I’m around.
I sit back in my seat and take a moment to study her.
She’s radiating anger, glowering at me like I’m not the most feared man in all of Europe, though I suspect that beneath that fury, she’s afraid. But she’s not giving in to it and that takes a certain amount of courage.
Interesting. It seems my bride-to-be is a little warrior, though she doesn’t look like one, dressed as she is in a flamboyant white wedding gown and veil. Her tiara is slightly askew and some of her glossy black hair has come out of its pins, and her pale skin is flushed with temper.
The little girl I protected has blossomed into a very pretty woman, it seems. Not that I require her to be pretty or indeed anything other than being a Salvatore. Her name and her value as a hostage are the most important things.
‘I could in fact kill you,’ I say. ‘Would you like that?’
‘That’s why you took me, isn’t it?’ Her pointed chin lifts, her expression half defiant, half imperious. ‘So you could finish the job you started twenty years ago?’
So, the little gattina remembers me. I wasn’t sure if she did.
‘If I wanted to do that, you’d be dead already,’ I observe. ‘But you were right back there in the cathedral.’
Her long, thick black lashes flutter as she blinks rapidly. ‘You kidnapping me, you mean? Oh…’ Understanding dawns. ‘I’m a hostage.’
I give her a slow smile, because I do like an intelligent woman. ‘Excellent answer. Ten points to you.’
‘My father will—’
‘Your father,’ I interrupt, ‘is irrelevant, no matter what he will or won’t do. I’m afraid, gattina, no one is going to save you this time.’
The delicate bow of her mouth, highlighted by some kind of shimmery pink lipstick, compresses into a line and fear flickers briefly in her eyes.
I expect her to cower in her seat, but she doesn’t. Instead, she stares back at me, undaunted despite her fear. ‘So? I’m going to be your prisoner?’
‘No, gattina,’ I correct her gently. ‘You’re going to be my wife.’