Chapter 1 #3
"Matteo Billone. Thirty-one. Law degree.
Political connections. Raised outside the Bonaccorso family by a single mother in Connecticut.
Funded by the Silent through a trust that traces back to the same financial network that ran the Kreiss operation.
" I pause. "He looks like Aurelio according to the whispers. "
"Is he dangerous?"
"He's a lawyer with Bonaccorso blood and Silent funding. Dangerous is the minimum requirement."
"Is he hot?"
"Gia, the fuck?"
"It's a valid question. If I'm going to watch my best friend get sold to a stranger, I'd at least like to know if the stranger is fuckable."
"I don't know what he looks like beyond a photograph, and I don't care because his appearance is irrelevant to the fact that I'm being handed to him as a strategic asset, not a wife."
"Everything you just said is valid and I still want to know if he's hot."
I look at her, and the absurdity of the conversation destroys any tension I feel. I laugh. The sound is ugly and short and wrong, and it turns into something that isn't laughing halfway through, and she holds me again while the sound works its way out.
I don't cry. I haven't cried in eleven years, and tonight isn't going to break that streak. But the thing happening in my chest is close enough that the distinction feels minute.
"Two weeks," I say when I can talk again.
"Fuck, he really didn’t waste any time."
"I'm going to walk into that compound with Vita and Morte and I'm going to look that man in the face and he's going to know exactly what he married. Not a bride. Not a treaty. Not a fucking dowry."
"What then?"
I reach into my pocket, wanting the familiarity of my blades, but then I remember I didn’t stop and grab them on the way here. A sigh escapes me.
"A fucking problem," I say. "He married a problem."
"Yeahhhhh, bestie! Get it. Bet you guys have some hot fucking hate sex within the first week."
"Oh shut up.” I roll my eyes at her before reaching over and grabbing her bra, chucking it at her face.
“Get packed. We leave in a week. I'm not waiting for Marco's timeline.
We go early. I want to see the compound before they're ready for me.
I want to know the exits, the security, the layout.
I want to know every corridor and every locked door and every man with a gun before I say I do. "
"And if the husband tries to stop you from learning his compound?"
"Then the husband learns what Vita and Morte are for."
My hands are steady. My breathing is even.
The fury is still there, running underneath everything, but it's controlled now.
Aimed. The directionless rage I felt in that office has found its target, and the target isn't Matteo Billone.
The target is the system that created this arrangement, the Silent, the Custodians, the faceless men above both families who decided that two bloodlines needed merging and a woman with karambits was the appropriate mechanism.
They picked the wrong woman.
"Toni."
"Yeah."
"Whatever happens over there, whatever the compound is like and whoever this man is and however bad it gets, I'm with you. You know that, right? I'm with you until they put me in the ground, and even then I'll haunt whoever's responsible like a sexy, feral ghost."
"I know."
"Good." She picks up the wine glass from the floor, takes a long drink, and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. "Now help me pack. I need to figure out which outfits say I'm here to support my friend and which ones say I'll stab you in the neck if you look at her wrong."
"And which give your tits the biggest lift so you can fuck whichever guard you fancy that day."
"Obviously." She giggles and twirls her dark hair in between her fingers. “Hopefully there’s one that’s cute enough to earn this pussy.”
I leave her place an hour later. The corridor is dark and quiet, the estate settling into its nighttime posture, soldiers on rotation, doors locked, the particular hush of a building full of dangerous men pretending to be civilized.
I walk back to my room and sit on my bed and pick up Vita and Morte.
The blades are cool against my palms. I slide the finger rings on and spin them, both hands, the idle rotation that calms my brain when nothing else will.
The curved edges catch the lamplight and throw small arcs of reflected light across the ceiling, and the sound of the spin, the whisper of the ring turning, is the only thing I've ever needed.
Aside from Gia.
Soon, I will walk into the Bonaccorso compound and marry a man I've never met. A man with my enemy's blood and my father's blessing and the Silent's fingerprints all over his life. A man who thinks he's getting a treaty bride, a Castillo asset, a woman shaped by her father into compliance.
He's getting me instead.
And I hope he's ready, because I'm not going quietly. I have never, in my entire life, gone quietly. My father learned that. His soldiers learned that. Six dead men learned it the hard way.
Billone is about to learn it too.
The karambits spin in my hands, and I sit in the dark and steel myself for what’s to come.