2. Cillian #3
“You,” she says, picking up her sad cappuccino and moving toward the far end of the island, “are never trying to be helpful. You’re trying to be insufferable and occasionally the two overlap.
” She sits down and wraps both hands around the cup and I wonder if she’s imagining the cup to be my neck.
“So thank you for that. It was very informative.”
I turn back to the window before she can see that I’m smiling.
“So,” Valentina says finally. “What happens now?”
“Now we live our lives,” I say. “Go to work. Come home. Pretend to be married when anyone’s watching.”
She quirks a brow. “And when no one’s watching?”
“We stay out of each other's way.”
She nods slowly, looking at her coffee. “I can work with that.”
Oh look, we agree on something. “Good.”
More silence. I check my phone and her eyes track the movement.
“Connor wants to see you already.” There’s something in her voice that I don’t like, but I refuse to show it. “You’ve been married less than twelve hours.”
“The work doesn’t stop because I have a wife now.”
She rolls her eyes. “How considerate of him.”
She’s watching me with an expression I can’t fully read. It’s like she’s studying me. “What?”
“Nothing.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “It’s just—Leo at least gave Emma a honeymoon.”
“I’m not Leo,” I remind her, annoyed she’s making the comparison. “And you’re not Emma.”
“No,” she says quietly. “We’re not.”
She finishes her coffee and stands before heading to the sink.
I expect her to just drop it in the sink and leave it for someone else to handle, so I’m surprised when she actually washes, dries, and puts it away.
I didn’t think she even knew how to wash anything.
When she passes me on the way back to the bedroom I catch her perfume.
It’s floral and light and probably ridiculously expensive, because Valentina Santoro doesn’t do cheap.
I should let her go.
We’ve established the terms and the terms are functional distance.
“Don’t take too long in the shower, princess,” I say, because some part of me enjoys my death warrant. “Some of us have actual work to do today.”
She stops and turns around slowly. “I have work too. I’m curating a gallery opening next month.” A pause. “Not that you’d know anything about that.”
I wave my hand flippantly. “Culture doesn’t pay the bills.”
“No.” Her smile is the sharpest thing in this kitchen and this kitchen has knives. “Breaking people’s bones for your uncle does that.”
I carefully set down my coffee cup. “At least I work. What do you do all day? Shop? Have lunch with your mother? Curate, whatever the hell that means, while someone else does the actual work?”
“Vaffanculo,” she responds.
I cock my head to the side. “Did you just tell me to go fuck myself in Italian? You already said that last night.” I mockingly tsk her. “You’re getting repetitive.”
The look she gives me is incandescent.
The fury in it is so clean and complete that for a second I see past the careful front of the Santoro princess and I see just the person underneath it, who is furious and not going to back down from anything.
She is going to be an absolute nightmare to live with.
“I hope Connor works you into the ground today,” she says, with a vicious sweetness that almost makes me smile. “It would save me the trouble of doing it myself.”
“The feeling is mutual, Mrs. Brennan.”
She turns on her heel and goes back to the bedroom. The door closes behind her hard enough that something in the frame rattles.
I look out the floor-to-ceiling windows at Central Park going gray then gold in the early light.
This is my life now.
That woman.
This apartment that belongs to Connor’s vision of what this alliance should look like.
I should feel worse about it than I do.
The thing is, Valentina Santoro—Brennan, technically, as of yesterday, though I give it another hour before she finds a way to make clear she’s still thinking of herself as a Santoro—is not what I expected.
I knew the broad strokes: the Santoro daughter, the gallery work, the careful social performance, the woman who’d been raised to be exactly what a mafia family needed her to be and had made a life inside those walls anyway.
I expected someone who’d been smoothed into compliance.
Someone who’d taken the shape of the container.
She has not taken the shape of anything.
She is exactly the shape she decided to be, which is sharp and difficult and completely unwilling to make this easy, and that is—
That is a problem, I think. That’s what that is. A problem I’m going to have to figure out.
I rinse my own cup and get my jacket, checking my phone one more time.
Report at noon, Connor had said, but I’m going in early, because the apartment is suddenly very small and I need to be somewhere that makes sense.
Somewhere where I know exactly what’s expected of me and I’m capable of delivering it.
I do better with clear objectives.
I let the door close quietly behind me when I leave, because continuing to piss her off would be petty and I’m not petty.
I’m practical, and practically speaking I’ve had enough of Valentina Santoro for one morning.
I make it to the elevator before I realize I’ve started thinking of her as Santoro again instead of Brennan.
She’d probably love that.
The elevator comes and I get in.
This marriage is going to be a war.
Good.
At least it won’t be boring.