Chapter 2
MATTEO
THE CELL DOOR OPENS, and she’s back, just like she said she would be.
I push myself up off the cold floor where I’ve spent the night with the cuffs digging into my wrists, and I give her the grin I gave her yesterday, because it’s the only thing in this place that still belongs to me.
She looks rested, put together, in control of every inch of this room.
She looks like she owns the air I’m breathing, which, technically, I guess she does.
“Morning, boss,” I say. “I was starting to think you’d forgotten about me.”
She holds up her phone and turns the screen toward me, and I figure she’s about to show me a list of all the ways she can make my life worse. Fine. I’ve heard threats before. My father made an art form out of them.
But it’s not a list. It’s a video.
I squint to get a better look. There’s a diner on the screen, shot from a camera up in the corner, and I’d recognize that person anywhere.
My father. He’s at a booth near the window with a coffee in front of him, talking to a man who’s looking through the window.
I know who it is before he even turns his head.
Adriano.
“What is this?” I ask, unable to look away from the screen.
My father smiles at Adriano, and they talk for a while like two men who like each other. Adriano reaches into his jacket, and I lean closer to the little screen.
My father jerks back against the window, his hand going to his chest, and the coffee cup tips over and spills across the table. Adriano gets up, calm as anything, and the footage cuts off there.
I watch the last frame, the coffee dripping off the edge of the table.
I laugh until I have to lean back against the stone wall so I don’t fall over, and Amalia watches me with her head tilted, as if she’s trying to figure out if I’ve lost my mind.
Maybe I have. But the man who told me my whole life that I wasn’t worthy and who handed his name and everything to a boy he found in the gutter, is dead in a diner booth, shot by the very son he loved best.
I run a hand over my face and let out a breath I think I’ve been holding for years.
He wanted to leave Adriano everything. His name, the territory, and all of it, and he said so to my face plenty of times, so I spent half my life trying to be good enough for a man who’d already made up his mind about me.
And in the end, his favorite put a bullet in him.
There’s something almost funny about that, and the grin spreads over my lips.
“You’re not upset,” she says.
“Should I be?” I shrug as best I can with my hands cuffed. “He spent years telling me I was worth less than a boy he picked up off the street. So no, I’m not crying about it.”
She studies me for a moment. I’ve got plenty to enjoy here, like the thought of my father bleeding out next to his cold coffee while Adriano strolled off.
The relief of it surprises me. Part of me expected to be upset, since Adriano took even this from me, but what comes up instead is light, easy, and almost giddy.
“I thought you’d want revenge,” she says, and she tucks the phone away. “Most men in your position would. Your father is dead, and your brother roaming around free after pulling the trigger. That’s the sort of thing a man can spend his whole life chasing.”
“He’s not my brother.” The words come fast, an edge in them. “He never was. My father just liked to pretend.”
“Even so.”
I want to argue, but the strange thing is that when I reach for the rage I’ve carried around for as long as I can remember, it’s not there.
Adriano took my father from me, except my father belonged to himself and to Adriano, never to me, so what exactly did he take?
I think about hunting Adriano down, putting a bullet in him like he put one in the old man, and I wait for the hunger to rise up in me like it always has.
But there’s just... emptiness.
“Maybe I would’ve cared once,” I admit, and I’m a little surprised I’m saying it out loud. “But I don’t see the point anymore.”
She moves a step closer, and I get a proper look at her in the dim light of the cell.
Dark brown hair, dark brown eyes. She’s beautiful in a hard, sure way, like a woman used to people doing what she tells them, and there’s a steadiness to her that most of the men I’ve known would kill to have.
I find myself wanting to know what she’s thinking, which is a dangerous thing to want from the person holding your chains.
“I have an offer for you,” she says.
“I’m listening. It’s not like I’ve got somewhere to be.”
“Marry me.”
I blink at her, certain I’ve heard it wrong. A woman I met yesterday in a dungeon, in front of me, asking me to marry her as if she’s asking me to pass the salt. I open my mouth, then close it, because for once in my life I don’t have a clever thing to say.
“You want to...” I shake my head. “Why would you want to marry me? You don’t even know me.”
“I don’t need to know you.” She folds her arms. “I need a face the men out there can follow. They won’t take orders from a woman, but they’ll take them from her husband, and you’ve got the name and the looks for it. That’s all you’d be. A face.”
“So I’d be a puppet.”
“You’d be alive,” she says, “which is more than you can say right now.”
I almost smile, because at least she’s honest about it. Most people dress these things up. She just lays it out on the table like it is.
“And I’d be in charge,” she says. “All of it. Every decision, every order, every move we make... You’d do exactly what I say, when I say it, and you wouldn’t question me in front of the men or behind their backs.
If I tell you to smile, you smile. If I tell you to shut your mouth, you don’t say a word. ”
“You want a husband or a dog?” I raise an eyebrow at her.
“I want someone who understands the arrangement.” Her face is serious. “You obey me completely, or there’s no deal. And there’s one more thing.”
“There always is.”
“You forget about Adriano.” She eyes me carefully. “No revenge. No going after him for what he did. The second you decide your dead father’s killer matters more than the life I’m handing you, you become a problem, and I don’t keep problems around.”
A few hours ago, I was a man with nothing ahead of me but a slow death in the dark. Now there’s a woman offering me a way out, even if the price is doing whatever she tells me for the rest of my life. And the only thing I’d have to give up is a revenge I’ve just discovered I don’t even want.
I think about Adriano, my father, and the years of coming in second. I wait for the old fury to flare up and tell me to spit in her face and demand blood.
But the old man is dead and I feel fine about that, and chasing Adriano would just be me clinging to a fight that always belonged to my father and his golden boy. I’m tired of that. For the first time, I’d rather just live.
“So let me get this straight,” I say. “I marry you, I do what you tell me, I give up on Adriano, and in exchange, I get to leave this cell alive.”
“That’s the deal. You’d be the husband of Amalia Petrelli. Me.” Her lips spread into a smile. “Everyone would think you’re in charge, but you wouldn’t be, and all my men would know it.”
I look at her for a long moment. She basically came down here and offered me a crown so she could rule from behind it.
She’s clever and ruthless, and she’s the most interesting thing that’s happened to me in years.
I should probably be more bothered that she wants to own me, but the truth is, I’m curious about her, and a part of me wants to find out exactly what sort of woman runs an empire from the shadows and asks a stranger to be her mask.
“Okay,” I say.
Her brow lifts just slightly, which is probably the first real reaction I’ve gotten out of her. “Okay?”
“Yeah. I’ll marry you.” I let my lips curve into a grin. “I’ll be your front, I’ll do what you say, and I’ll forget Adriano ever existed. When do we start?”
She studies me for one more moment. “Soon.” She turns toward the door. “Get some sleep. You’ll need it.”
And as she heads up the stairs and leaves me in the dark, I realize that I’m not thinking about my father, or Adriano, or about what happened at the diner.
I’m thinking about Amalia, and how I’m going to enjoy figuring out exactly who I just agreed to marry.
Even if I end up dead, at least the ride to hell will be fun.