A Marriage Paid in Blood (Kings of Blood and Shadow #1)

CHAPTER 1

ELENA

The man accused of murdering my brother stood ten feet from his coffin.

No one asked him to leave.

That was the first thing I noticed, which made me hate myself almost as much as I hated him.

The second was that Nico Orsini looked like a man attending a funeral, not a man enjoying the consequences of what he had done.

Rain darkened the shoulders of his black overcoat.

He had no umbrella, although three armed men stood close enough to hold one for him.

Water had flattened his nearly black hair at the temples, sharpening the old break in his nose and the severe line of his mouth. He kept his hands visible at his sides.

A courtesy, perhaps.

Or a reminder that he did not need a weapon in them to be dangerous.

“Elena.”

My uncle Vittorio touched my elbow. His fingers were warm through the thin sleeve of my dress, paternal in the way they had been since I was a child and my father had been too busy building an empire to attend school plays.

“You don’t have to look at him.”

I turned my attention back to the polished walnut coffin beneath the canopy.

Marco would have hated the flowers.

There were too many white lilies, all of them arranged in symmetrical towers that made the church steps smell sweet and damp and faintly rotten. My brother had claimed lilies reminded him of hotel lobbies trying to disguise old plumbing.

He would have said it now, close to my ear, while our father glared at us for whispering during the service.

The memory arrived so clearly that I almost shifted to make room for him.

My gloved hand tightened around the folded program.

Grief had become skilled at impersonating expectation.

Across the cemetery, my father stood surrounded by Bellandi men in dark suits. Carlo Bellandi had not cried in public. He had not slept much either, judging by the gray shadows beneath his eyes, but exhaustion had only made him more rigid. More dangerous.

His gaze remained fixed on Nico.

Vittorio followed mine. “Your father should never have allowed this.”

“Nico came under truce.”

“Some men use rules only when the rules protect them.”

“And some men break them at funerals.”

My uncle’s expression softened with something that looked like approval. “You sound like your brother.”

It should have comforted me.

Instead, it pressed against the hollow place beneath my ribs where every comparison to Marco now hurt.

The priest continued speaking. Rain tapped against the canopy. Cameras waited beyond the cemetery gates, their lenses trained on the two families mourning one man and preparing, everyone knew, to kill dozens more.

Five days ago, Marco had been found in a private service corridor of the Bellandi Grand Hotel with a bullet in his chest and an Orsini weapon six feet from his body.

Four days ago, my father had ordered every Bellandi property searched for Orsini surveillance.

Three days ago, one of our warehouses had burned.

Yesterday, Vittorio had quietly moved Sofia from her apartment to the family house because, as he put it, grief made people careless.

Today, Nico Orsini had come to watch us bury my brother.

The priest finished.

Men began moving.

My father reached the grave first. He placed one hand on the coffin and lowered his head. The others gave him a respectful distance, but not privacy. Men like my father had surrendered privacy years before I was born.

Sofia came to my side. Her hand slipped into mine.

She was twenty-four, four years younger than me, and had dressed as if the right black coat might make her invisible. Her blond-streaked brown hair was pinned beneath a small hat that did not suit her. Marco would have teased her for it until she threw something at him.

Her fingers were cold.

“Is he really going to stand there?” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“Papa is going to kill him.”

“Not here.”

“You sound very sure.”

I looked at our father.

“No,” I said. “I sound like someone who cannot afford to be wrong.”

The pallbearers stepped forward.

Marco’s coffin began to descend.

A sound moved through Sofia, too quiet to be called a sob. She turned her face into my shoulder.

I watched the coffin disappear into the earth and thought about the last message my brother had sent me.

Remember the vendor meeting Thursday. They’ll try to push the new linen contract through without you.

Nothing tender. Nothing final. A reminder about sheets.

For five days I had stared at that message and tried to find evidence he had known he was going to die. A hidden warning. An unusual word. A punctuation mark he never used.

There was nothing.

Marco had died believing he would speak to me again.

The service broke apart into smaller griefs. Relatives approached. Allies offered promises disguised as condolences. Employees from the hotel stood together at the rear, uncomfortable among the armed men. I knew most of them by name. Marco had known some.

I thanked everyone.

I accepted embraces.

I remembered which widow had a bad hip and which manager’s son had just started college.

Work was easier than grief because work gave the body somewhere to stand.

By the time I noticed Nico moving toward me, he had already passed through two lines of Bellandi men.

The conversations around us thinned.

Sofia lifted her head.

Vittorio stepped in front of me.

Nico stopped several feet away.

Up close, he looked tired. Not careless, not weakened. The exhaustion sat deeper than that, as if he had been carrying it privately for longer than five days.

My attention caught on the cuff of his coat. A glimpse of dull silver.

I knew that cufflink.

Marco had owned a pair shaped like old hotel keys. Our mother had given them to him when he turned twenty-one.

This was not one of them.

No. I was looking for ghosts in metal now.

“Elena,” Nico said.

His voice was low and rough, carrying easily without force.

“My condolences.”

Vittorio laughed once, without humor. “You have a remarkable understanding of insult.”

Nico did not look at him. “I didn’t come to insult anyone.”

“You came because you knew the truce would keep you alive.”

That, finally, drew Nico’s attention. “If I had been concerned only with staying alive, I would not have come.”

“Stop.” My voice sounded distant to me, but both men obeyed.

I stepped around Vittorio.

Nico’s eyes were dark brown, nearly black beneath the gray sky. He watched my face without pretending not to measure my reaction.

I wanted to strike him.

The desire was clean. Almost relieving.

“Did you kill my brother?” I asked.

Somewhere behind me, my father swore.

Nico did not look away.

“No.”

The answer came too quickly to be hesitation and too simply to be persuasion.

“You expect me to believe that?”

“No.”

Rain slid from his hair to the collar of his coat.

“But Marco knew he was in danger.”

Everything around me seemed to sharpen at once—the scrape of shoes on wet gravel, the hiss of tires beyond the gate, Sofia’s breath beside my shoulder.

“What did you say?”

Nico’s gaze moved briefly past me, toward the line of waiting cars.

“He knew someone was closing in on him.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“You knew he was in danger and said nothing?”

His expression changed, not enough for anyone else to notice. A tightening near the eyes. Something like pain, immediately controlled.

“I knew part of it.”

“And what part was that?”

“Elena,” Vittorio warned.

I ignored him.

Nico’s attention shifted again toward the cars and stayed there.

The movement was small, but his entire body changed around it. His shoulders lowered. His weight moved forward.

“What?” I demanded.

He started walking toward me.

Not quickly.

Too quickly.

“Don’t get in your car.”

My father’s men reacted at once. Jackets opened. Hands moved.

Nico kept coming.

I stepped back. “What did you do?”

“Which car is yours?”

“You know exactly which car is mine.”

His eyes found the black sedan at the curb, the one with the silver Bellandi crest discreetly set beneath the rear window.

“Get away from it.”

One of our drivers had already opened the rear door.

Vittorio caught my arm. “This is a trick.”

Nico’s voice cut through the rain. “Move her.”

His men surged forward.

Ours met them.

For one absurd second, the cemetery became a knot of black coats and raised weapons while Marco’s open grave waited behind us.

Then Nico reached me.

He did not ask permission. One arm closed around my waist, hard enough to lift my feet from the ground, and he drove us sideways behind a stone mausoleum.

I struck his shoulder.

“What are you—”

The explosion swallowed the rest.

Heat slammed across the cemetery. Glass burst in a glittering wave. The ground struck my knees before I understood we had fallen.

Nico covered me with his body.

The sound went on inside my skull after the world itself had gone silent.

I smelled burning rubber, wet stone and something metallic. Dirt pressed against my palms. My right hand stung.

Nico said my name.

I could not hear him.

His mouth moved close to my face. He touched my jaw, then my throat, checking for injuries with controlled urgency.

I shoved him.

He allowed himself to be pushed back only far enough to look at me.

The black sedan was burning.

The driver lay on the gravel several yards from the open door. Men ran toward him. Others formed a wall around my father and Sofia.

The rain struck the flames and did nothing.

I looked at Nico.

His coat had been torn across one shoulder. Blood marked his cheek, probably from flying glass. His expression held no triumph.

Only fury.

Not directed at me.

My gloved hand had been sliced open. Blood spread between my fingers, too bright against the white fabric.

Nico saw it.

His control fractured then.

Not dramatically. He did not curse or shout.

His face went still in a way that frightened me more.

“Who knew which car I would use?” I asked.

His eyes lifted to mine.

“Your family.”

The grave, the burning car and the armed men seemed to tilt around us.

“And yours,” I said, because the alternative was worse.

Nico looked toward the wreckage.

“Yes.”