Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Luca
The priest checks his watch for the second time, and I catch myself doing the same thing, which is worse.
The chapel is small. One aisle, ten pews, a door at the back and a door behind the altar that leads to a sacristy with one window.
Dante sits in the second pew with his arm along the backrest. Valentino stands near the wall.
Nico is by the door with his phone in his hand and Liam is outside with the cars.
Four men, one priest, and me. The rest of the family is already at the venue, waiting on a bride and groom who have known each other for a week.
"You look like you're going to trial," Dante says.
"We had the trial. This is the sentencing."
He laughs. Valentino doesn't. Valentino has been looking at me since this morning the way he looked at me in the hospital in Rome, and I keep giving him my profile so he'll stop.
The party wasn't my idea. I told Bruno a signature and a witness would do the job.
Bruno said no. Orsini asked for a celebration, something public, photographed, catered, real.
So there's a hall in Lake Forest right now with flowers in it, and I'm supposed to stand in it holding my wife's waist like I've held it a hundred times.
I've seen her three times in three days.
Once in a hallway with Nina on her hip, both of them in socks.
Once at breakfast, across a table with six other people, where she cut Nina's toast into small squares and didn't look at me until she did, and then looked away.
Once last night, for four minutes, when I knocked on her door and told her the schedule for today.
She said okay. She said it twice. Then she thanked me, which I told her to stop doing, and she apologized for it, which is worse.
The rest of the three days I spent in Bruno's office.
Cesare Orsini is dying. His doctor gives him ten months, maybe less if the winter is hard on him.
Bruno told me this on the first morning, sitting behind his desk, and I understood the shape of the deal before he finished the sentence.
A dying man doesn't want war. A dying man wants to see the daughter nobody knows he has, but he wants to see her without her learning what she is to him.
So the terms are simple. Orsini attends as an associate. A business friend of the family, an old man from Milwaukee, nothing more. He gets to stand in the same room as her. He gets to hear her voice.
He does not approach her alone, he does not tell her anything, and he does not send men through any more doors. In exchange, the Sartoris get Milwaukee's docks warm instead of cold, and I get a wife who thinks she's marrying me to close a debt her dead husband left behind.
"And you two play the couple," Bruno said, on the second day. "Convincingly. He'll be watching. His people will be watching. If it looks like a contract, the deal is paper."
I told him fine. I didn't tell him that the problem isn't making it look real. The problem is the roof three nights ago, her mouth on mine, her legs around me, and how I've spent three days keeping a hallway's distance because I don't trust my own hands near her. That part Bruno doesn't need.
The priest clears his throat. Nico looks up from his phone and nods once toward the door.
"Here we go," Dante says, and stands.
I face the aisle.
The doors open.
Kristen comes through first, holding the door, and then Gemma steps into the light.
The dress is simple. White, plain, no lace, no train. It fits her like it was cut for her body and nothing else, close at the waist, moving when she moves. Her hair is that pale gold now, loose at her shoulders, and she's holding a small bunch of white flowers.
She finds me at the end of the aisle.
She starts walking.
My hands are steady. My pulse is not, and I stand very still so nobody sees the difference.
She's three steps away when she looks up at me, grey-blue eyes level, and says, quiet enough that only I can hear it, "Okay."
The priest opens his book.
Gemma
The ring is big. Not by much, but enough that it spins when I press my thumb against it, and I've been spinning it since we left the chapel.
"The Orsinis will be at the venue," Luca says from the front seat of the car. He doesn't turn around. "They're coming to see the marriage with their own fucking eyes. So today, you and I are in love."
"Okay," I say.
Now he turns. His arm comes over the seat back and his eyes find me, pale green, steady, checking whether the okay is a real okay or one of the other ones.
"Gemma. They'll be watching how you look at me. How I touch you. Whether you flinch."
"I heard you." I stop spinning the ring. "How much touching are we talking about? Like, hand-holding, or more than that? Because I should know before it happens. I don't do well when hands come at me and I didn't get a warning."
The man driving, Liam, glances at me in the mirror.
"A hand at your back," Luca says. "Your waist. Maybe a kiss."
A kiss. Right.
He faces front again, and I think about the roof because apparently that's what I do now. I've had two days of fittings and paperwork to stop thinking about it, and I haven't stopped once.
I told him we shouldn't do that. I meant it.
It's still true. He works for people who put men in the ground, I've known him for some days, and my track record with men is a debt with my name on it.
Kissing him was a mistake, and people get to make mistakes, that's a normal human thing, you make one and you move on and you don't do it again.
Except now I live with mine. The mistake has a ring on it.
"Tonight, after the venue," Luca says, "we go to the new apartment.
Not the building on Loomis. A place with your name on the lease next to mine.
Tomorrow you start living in the open. Walks with Nina.
The park on Damen. Groceries. I'll be with you.
Orsini's people need to see a family, so we give them a family. "
"A schedule of being normal," I say.
"The venue has two exits off the main hall," Liam says. "East and through the kitchen. Mr. Farro will be within arm's reach of you the entire evening. So will I."
"Thank you," I say.
Here's the thing about tonight. A room full of strangers, catering, a photographer.
And I'm supposed to smile at all of it like a woman who fell in love fast and married faster.
I've never been good in rooms of strangers.
At my actual wedding, I threw up in the church bathroom twenty minutes before.
My mother held my hair and told me it was just excitement, and I let her believe that because it was easier for both of us.
I called her two days ago. She talked for ten minutes about the neighbor's new fence, Dad's knee and the casserole she froze for the church thing, and she asked how Nina was.
I said good, growing, and she said give her a squeeze from Grandma.
She didn't ask why the number was new. She never pushes, my mother, never has, and my whole life I filed that under kindness.
She lets me come to her, that's what she'd say.
She didn't notice anything was wrong with me at all. I used to be grateful for that.
I'm not sure I am anymore.
The car slows. Through the window I see a long white building, hedges cut into squares, a valet stand, men near the door standing the way Luca stands, weight even, hands loose.
Luca gets out and opens my door himself before Liam can move. He puts his hand out, palm up, and waits. I look at the tattoos crossing his knuckles and the ring on his left hand that matches mine.
"Fair warning," he says. "I'm about to touch you."
I put my hand in his. My pulse picks up, and it isn't fear, and that's the problem I'm carrying into this building along with the flowers.
"They're already watching," he says, low, close to my ear. "Smile at me, wife."
I do. And it comes easier than it should.