Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Luca
The room holds two hundred people and I count nine of ours before we clear the doors.
Two by the terrace exit. One at the service corridor.
Dante near the bar with his jacket cut loose enough to hide what's under it.
Bruno spared nothing. This is the most guarded wedding party in Chicago tonight, and half the guests think they're at a normal one.
That's the point. You send out enough invitations, you get enough strangers in good suits, and a contract starts to look like a marriage.
Gemma's hand rests on my arm. Her eyes go where mine went first. The exits. She found them before the flowers.
"There are so many of them," she says under the music.
"The family or the guests?"
"The family."
"Half these people aren't family. They're decoration." I turn us along the edge of the floor, away from the band. "The ones that matter, I'll give you again. You met Bruno."
"Bruno I remember. Bruno must be the kind of man who looks at people until they confess to things."
I look at her. She's not joking. It's the most accurate description of Bruno Sartori I've heard in years.
"Don't say that where he can hear you," I say. "He'd fucking enjoy it."
"Noted."
I angle my chin toward the far wall, where a man in a dark suit stands with a glass he isn't drinking from. "Pietro. Bruno's brother. He ran things for a while. Now he doesn't."
"Pietro. Scar in his eyebrow."
"Good. The redhead next to him is Nora. His wife. Irish. If you get stuck at a table, get stuck at hers — she doesn't let a silence sit."
Gemma's lips move. She's repeating the names to herself. She did this for three days at the compound with a list Antonella wrote out for her, and I watched her fold the paper smaller and smaller until it lived in her pocket.
"The one laughing," she says. "By the champagne."
"Lorenzo. Restaurants. He'll feed you until you can't stand up and he'll mean it kindly. His wife's the one beside him — Sophia. Young. Don't let it fool you, she's harder than half the men in this fucking room."
"Lorenzo, food. Sophia, dangerous." She exhales. "There's a woman by the windows staring at her phone."
"Vittoria. The sister. She's probably watching the camera feeds right now instead of the party. The big one behind her is Dmitri. Russian. Her husband. If a man looks like a door and you don't recognize him, it's Dmitri."
"He's very large."
"He's aware of it."
She almost smiles. I catalog it and move on before I stare too long.
"Kristen you know," I say. "Nico's her husband. He's the one who'll stand in a corner and look at you like you're a math problem. It's not personal. He does it to every damn person he's ever met."
"Nico. Staring, not personal." Gemma's fingers tighten a fraction on my sleeve. "And Dante I remember. From the apartment."
"Antonella you know. Everyone else in this room, you smile and you forget them."
"They should wear name tags," she says. "It would be more efficient."
The laugh gets halfway up my throat before I kill it. Fabio spends money on jokes and gets nothing from me. This woman suggests name tags at a mafia wedding and I have to look at the band for a second.
Then she leans in. Her shoulder touches my arm and her voice drops so low I bend to catch it.
"Luca. I'm nervous."
Her breath is short and her hand has gone wet through my sleeve.
I turn so my body blocks her from the room. Whatever my face does, only she gets it.
"Listen to me," I say. "Any time it's too much — the people, the noise, any of it — you lean on me.
That's the signal. You put your weight on my arm and I'll have you out of this fucking room in under a minute.
There's a study down the hall and a terrace past the kitchen and I know which one's empty.
Nobody will follow us and nobody will ask. You understand?"
She looks up at me. The blue eyes go over my face the way they did in the compound hallway and the room gets muted around us. Neither of us moves.
"Thank you," she says, and smiles.
Across the room, Dante sets down his glass. He catches my eye and tips his chin toward the main doors, one inch, no more.
The Orsinis are here.
Gemma
Luca's hand finds the small of my back, and he dips his head close to my ear.
"They're here. We have to kiss. Right now, before they cross the room."
I blink once. Two weeks ago I was wiping ketchup off diner tables, and now a man is telling me we need to kiss for an audience of criminals. Okay.
I turn into him and close the distance before I can think about it too long.
My hand lands on his chest, his mouth meets mine, and it's meant to be simple, a photo, proof for whoever's watching.
Except his fingers spread wide against my spine and pull me in a half inch farther than the photo needs, and a low sound comes out of him.
Quiet, caught at the back of his throat, and I feel it against my lips more than I hear it.
I pull back and I'm smiling. I don't decide to. It's just there on my face.
"If that's how you fake a kiss," I say, "what does a real one look like?"
Luca goes still. Then he leans down, slow, his cheek almost touching mine, and his voice lands warm against my ear.
"If I kiss you the way I fucking want to, you'll be begging me for more in front of two hundred people."
I blink. Then I laugh, one short burst I can't hold in, because that's the last sentence I ever expected out of him, and because heat crawls up my neck and I like it, and liking it embarrasses me more than the sentence does.
My pulse is going hard enough that I can feel it in my ears. Eighteen months of nothing, and this man says one thing in my ear and my whole body wakes up like it never went to sleep.
I open my mouth to answer him. I have no idea what I'm going to say, but I open it anyway.
"Farro. Congratulations."
The voice comes from my left. Luca straightens before I've even finished turning, and his hand stays flat on my back, steady.
An old man stands in front of us. Thin, in a dark suit, with white hair combed back and skin that's gone yellow at the edges. Sick, I think. He has the look Mariela's mother had in the last photos. His eyes are dark and they're on my face. They don't move off it.
"Signora Farro," he says, and he reaches for my hand.
Luca warned me people would touch me tonight. I let the old man take my fingers, and he bends and presses his mouth to my knuckles, dry and light. He holds on one beat longer than a stranger should.
"Cesare Orsini," he says, straightening. "It's a great pleasure."
The Orsinis. The ones who sent men to Luca's apartment. The ones this whole marriage exists for. I keep my face pleasant and my breathing even.
"Thank you for coming," I say.
A younger man stands at Cesare's shoulder. Thirty, maybe, with the old man's dark eyes and none of his sickness, black hair pushed back, a glass of wine held by the bowl instead of the stem. He's already looking at me when I look at him.
"Ludovico," he says. "His son. Everyone calls me Vico." He doesn't reach for my hand, which I appreciate. Then he tilts his head. "Have we met?"
"I don't think so," I say. "No."
It's true. I'd remember. I remember every man who looks at me the way he's looking at me now, which is too long and too careful, top to bottom and back to my face, like he's checking my answer against a list.
Dominik's friends used to look at me like that when they thought he wasn't watching. My skin tightens under my dress.
"Strange," Vico says. "You have a familiar face."
"I get that a lot," I say. I don't. Nobody has ever said that to me in my life.
Cesare hasn't stopped watching me. He isn't looking at me the way his son is. It's different, and I can't place it. Not being able to place it bothers me more than Vico's staring does. The old man's eyes move over my face slow, like he's reading it.
Luca's hand slides from my back to my hip and settles there.
"You'll excuse us," he says. "We've got a hell of a lot of guests to greet. Enjoy the party."
He says it pleasant enough, but he's already turning me, his arm steering me away in a slow curve so it looks like a couple drifting instead of a man removing his wife from a conversation. I match his pace and keep my smile up.
"Of course," Cesare says behind us. "Go. It's your night."
We're four steps away when I glance back. I shouldn't, but I do.
Vico is still watching me over the rim of his glass. And the old man has turned to his son and is saying a word into his ear. Whatever the word is, it's about me.
We're deep in the crowd, past a table of white flowers and a woman in gold who congratulates us without stopping her own conversation.
"Why did they look at me like that?"
Luca keeps walking. His hand stays on my hip, warm through the fabric, and I feel him check the room over my head before he answers.
Luca is quiet for four steps. The band starts a slow song behind us, and somewhere to my right glasses touch each other and a man laughs too loud.
"Men in this world look at people who aren't from it that way sometimes," he says. "You're a civilian who married in. To them you're a fucking curiosity. They want to know what you are, whether you're a threat, whether you're worth anything. It's how they size up anything new."
"I didn't like it."
"I know. I didn't fucking like it either."
"Okay," I say, and I keep walking.
We pass a waiter with a tray of champagne. Luca lifts two glasses without slowing down and puts one in my hand. Ahead of us there's a small circle near the windows, and I recognize the woman in it before Luca says anything.
Vittoria. Dark hair down her back, a green dress, standing next to Dmitri.
"God," I say, quieter than I mean to. "She's so beautiful."
Luca glances at her, then back at the room, because he never stops watching the room. "She'll like you for saying that. Don't say it to her face or she'll keep you talking for an hour."
I barely hear him, because Vittoria is looking up at her husband and he's looking down at her.
His hand rests on her lower back the same way Luca's rests on mine, except hers isn't for an audience.
She says a thing I can't hear and his whole face changes.
She laughs at whatever he answers, and he watches her laugh like it's the only girl in the world.
My chest goes tight. Not jealousy, exactly. More that I'm watching proof of a thing I stopped believing in. It took me years to learn the difference between a man watching you and a man guarding what he owns. This is neither one. This is a man who got lucky and knows it.
"They look happy," I say.
"They are. Sickening, isn't it? The whole fucking family's like that now. You'll get used to it." He says.
Vittoria spots us. She smiles and touches Dmitri's arm. They start toward us through the crowd.
I turn my head and look up at my husband.
"After this," I say, "I'm going to need a cigarette and a strong drink. In that order. Possibly at the same time."
Luca looks down at me. He laughs. Short, rough, real. Low enough that only I get it. I've never heard that sound come out of him. The fact that I'm the one who pulled it out of him does a warm, stupid thing to me that I refuse to examine right now.
"Yeah," he says, still close to my ear as Vittoria reaches us. "Me too."
Then he straightens, and the mask comes back over him. Vittoria opens her arms to me like we're already friends.