Chapter 5 #2
After a while, the shaking eases enough for me to stand.
I wrap a towel around myself and step out into the cool air of my bathroom.
The house is quiet in a way that makes the ache louder.
My hand keeps finding the place on my arm where the man gripped me, like checking a scar.
I cradle that bruise as if it’s a map showing me where I almost died, a marker of what I have to remember.
I am alive. The thought is small, and it does not make the panic leave, but it steadies me enough to move.
I force my feet to carry me into my room, toward clothes that will pretend I am whole, toward whatever ceremony my family will decide to perform to turn tonight into a ledger entry and not a wound.
My body still hums from the kiss and from the violence; the two things are braided tight inside me, impossible to untangle.
I don’t know who that makes me yet—not wholly brave, not wholly broken—only that nothing after tonight will be the same. The most terrifying thing?
It’s not about what almost happened.
It’s that I can’t stop thinking about him. Raffael.
The way he moved. The way he shot like he’d done it a hundred times. The way he didn’t hesitate, not even once. Or the way he looked at me after. Not scared. Not sorry. Just… cold.
Detached.
Like saving me was an inconvenience. He didn’t ask if I was okay, didn’t say my name, didn’t even look at me like a person. He looked at me like I was just another complication in his life he didn't want to deal with.
But I can’t stop replaying it. That moment. That look. And of course, that kiss. Even now, hours later, when I press my fingers to my lips, I can still feel his on them.
He could’ve turned away. Could’ve stayed out of it. Nobody would have ever known. But he didn’t. He stepped in when there was nobody else to do so.
And then another thought hits me.
He could have been killed.
He killed for us.
He killed for me.
If I had a crush on Raffael before, it's now ten times worse. I know Izzy and Camilla both have a crush on him, too. Not Gigi, though, she's crushing on her own bodyguard. The rest of us, though, are infatuated with Raffael. Raffael, with his dark looks, tattoos, and that lethal bad boy vibe, is every girl’s wet dream. It doesn’t help that he’s hot—scorching—in the kind of way that makes you wonder if touching him would leave a mark.
We used to whisper about him when he stood by the doors at parties, silent and still like a panther in the dark.
He never talked to us. Never looked twice. But we looked.
God, we looked.
After last night, he will no longer be just the hot soldier we whisper about.
He's something else entirely now for me. Something permanent. I don’t care that I’m only eighteen.
That I don’t have a real boyfriend yet. That I’ve never had sex or been in love or done half the things my friends brag about.
Because I know one thing now with absolute, soul-deep certainty: There will never be another man for me. Raffael is it.
Despite my rambling thoughts and the turmoil in my head, I finally fall asleep only to wake up to Angelo’s voice downstairs, barking orders like we’re under siege. And then I hear Father Dearest's dreaded voice, "Sophia Orsi, get down here. Now!"
I know better than to make him wait. I throw on a bathrobe and hurry down the stairs, following the sounds of more yelling, straight into my father's study. He and Angelo fall silent the moment I enter. "Close the fucking door," Angelo finally presses out.
As soon as the door is closed, Father walks forward to slap me squarely across the cheek. So hard, my head turns to the side. I push my tears of anger, hurt, and humiliation down. Deep down, to join all the others I collected over the years.
"That is only the beginning," Father snarls. "Forget college, you’ve proven that you can't be on your own. And God knows I can't watch you twenty-four-seven."
Dread fills me. No college?
I graduated from High School a few weeks ago, and my friends and I have plans for college. We were going to live in an apartment together. The dread only grows when Father's other words sink in. He can't watch me twenty-four seven. So what does that mean? Who is going to do the watching?
"I spoke to Giovanni and Roberto Giordano this morning. Thankfully, they think that our families merging will be in both our best interests, and Roberto has generously agreed to marry you."
Warning eyes land on me the moment I open my mouth to protest.
"I won’t do it," I declare, setting my chin because it feels like the only thing I have that’s still mine.
My father laughs spitefully; it’s low and dangerous. A sound that rolls out of the back of his throat and takes the room with it. He sinks back into a chair like a king settling into a throne. Angelo’s smile is a slit of satisfaction. The study smells of old money and punishment.
“Don't even think Marcello will save you,” my father says, slow enough to make it land. “Marcello’s in Sicily, sweetheart. Exiled, do you remember? He’s been scraping by for months, living off favors and the pity of men who keep their hands clean.
” He leans forward, and the light catches his eyes in a way that strips any softness from them.
“You think you can run to your brother and hide? You would drag whatever’s left of his life into the street. ”
Angelo steps in before I can form a protest. “You run to Marcello, and you mark him."
My stomach drops. For one ragged second, I let myself imagine Marcello, the only man who ever treated me with something like care, dragged into whatever this would become.
I taste bile. I had been ready to run to him because I believed he’d hold me, unblinking and unjudging, but the room closes around the truth like a fist: going to him would only make his life more miserable.
My father’s hand taps the desk—a metronome of inevitability. “If you go, you don’t just put yourself at risk. You put him at risk.” There is no softness in it, no negotiation. It is a verdict wrapped in the tone of a man who knows how to make people vanish without messy drama.
The words are blunt, ugly, and effective.
Guilt folds over me, hot and immediate. I see Marcello’s face—the way he ruffled my hair when I was little, the way his voice was a warmth that didn’t barter—and I can’t pretend it won’t matter what I ask of him.
Running wouldn’t be brave. It would be selfish and dangerous.
So I swallow. The defiance is still there, a coiled thing, but it curls into something quieter. I am afraid for myself, and I am afraid for him, and for the first time I taste how tightly the world around me is stitched: every escape I imagine ropes someone else in. The choices are not just mine.
“I won’t run,” I say, and there is a truth to it, but not the whole of one.
My voice is steady because I need it to be.
Inside, the fight is still burning, but for now I fold it into the silence of the study, where men in suits decide how girls like me are traded, and where love, if it exists, is the most dangerous contraband of all.
My father’s face is a slate I can’t read. He leans forward, fingers steepled, and every word he says makes the room appear smaller.
“No contact with your friends,” he announces. “They are not to call you, visit you, or send messages. Not for three months. Any man who approaches you without our approval will be treated as an intruder.”
Angelo’s grin is a knife that slides across the skin of the room.
“No phones. Your line goes dead until we say otherwise,” Daddy Dearest continues.
“There will be a party soon. An announcement. Your engagement will be presented as a unity between houses, stability for the family. If you want any privileges back—your phone, your outings, the company of friends—you will toe the line. You will behave. You will be pleasant to your fiancée.” He lifts his eyes to me, the glare of a man who believes mercy is a currency he spends when he feels like it. “Be nice to Roberto.”
Angelo laughs softly, the sound like someone warming his hands over a future bonfire. “Remember this, Sophia: you will smile. You will keep your mouth shut. You will accept what’s given. Or you will learn what it means to be a lesson.”
The words land like weights on my chest. My throat tightens.
There’s a dull, buzzing in my ears, part fear, part a fury that tastes metallic.
My friends—Gigi, Cammie, Izzy—their faces flash through my head for a second like photographs: Gigi's reckless grin, Cammie's tight jaw, Izzy's steady hum. They’ll be kept away. They’ll be told to stay away. I hear the echo of Gigi’s guard swearing under his breath, furious, and I know that they will enforce it.
Marcello sits in the back of my mind—that warm thought that had been a rope I almost reached for—until my father’s words flattened it.
If I run to him, I drag him into the crosshairs.
If I defy them, he'll be at risk too. He’s already had to deal with the consequences of our father's wrath; he's just starting to put his life in order.
I can't burden him with mine, too. The choice tightens into something ugly and immediate: sacrifice or isolation.
My hands curl into fists in my lap until the knuckles go white.
The warmth left in me from the SUV, from Raffael’s hand, the kiss, feels like contraband.
Someone has put a seal across that part of me and stamped it with a warning.
I'm not allowed to have any allies, no excuses, no small rebellions.
I'm supposed to smile at a man I don’t want to marry and play the dutiful daughter in front of an audience that will measure my obedience.
“Do you understand?” my father asks.
I swallow and nod because I need to buy myself minutes, breaths, any small mercy to figure out a way around this. My voice is a thread when it comes. “Yes.”