3. Three
THREE
HARLOWE
Ispent the next six weeks hating my father with an intensity that felt ultraviolet.
I didn’t sleep, not because of the nightmares, but because flaming out was preferable to whatever waited in the dark—where wedding dresses came out of coffins, and Arrow’s face hovered just behind my eyelids.
I washed the blood out of my mouth and painted my lips a red so sharp they could be mistaken for a weapon.
The dinner to announce our arranged marriage was two weeks after the conversation with my father, but Arrow Romanov didn’t show up until the day before the party. He sent a package ahead—a Cartier box containing a collar.
Platinum, inlaid with obsidian, heavy enough to function as shackles, etched with the phrase ‘fiat pax.’
Let there be peace.
I laughed so hard that I cried and wore it to the ‘celebratory’ dinner out of spite.
It was held in a restaurant reserved for New York’s most dangerous clientele, which included mobsters, actors, and politicians who pretended not to recognize each other beyond the caviar tower. He wanted a show of our engagement.
My father arrived late, trailed by a swirl of bodyguards, while I sat next to Frank, knocking back martinis. After an hour of polite hell, Arrow Romanov made his entrance.
If the air already ached with violence and old money, then it became suddenly charged when he walked in.
That’s how Arrow moved, like he was made of electrical currents.
He wore a slate-gray suit, tailored to fit his muscular frame like a glove. His hair was black, slicked back like a proper mobster, and when he looked at me, his eyes were so pale they seemed illuminated from within, not gray so much as a blade dipped in ice and set to glint in the dark.
Arrow didn’t make a show of kissing cheeks, as was the tradition at these farcical mafia affairs. Instead, he walked the length of the banquet hall with a confidence so absolute it was offensive, and stopped with a tap of his knuckle against my chair.
“I see my gift suits you,” he said, voice low, gravely from years of chain smoking, or whatever his family did instead of talking.
I swallowed and forced a smile. “I didn’t have time to resize it for the dog.”
His mouth twitched.
Whether it was a smile, or a threat, I couldn’t tell.
He pivoted away from my father’s outstretched hand, ignoring the theatrics, and circled until he could lean over my ear, his mouth so close I could smell the whiskey on his breath.
“It would be a shame to waste something so pretty on a mutt.”
I felt that in my marrow, and I hated myself for how it made my skin buzz. I tasted the shame, sweet as syrup, and turned my head as if searching for Frank, but Arrow’s hand came to rest on my shoulder—a brief, proprietary claim, enough to make my spine lock up.
There was a sliver of pressure, exactly where the nape of my neck met the collar, and the whole table fell still at his touch. He hadn’t even glanced at my father, but I felt Giovanni’s rage simmering across thirty feet of white tablecloth and crystal.
Arrow bent lower. “You look good in obsidian, Harlowe. Have you ever tasted it?”
He was baiting me.
I didn’t flinch or answer, but I did hold eye contact. His stare was surgical and unblinking. If I’d started to believe the rumors about Arrow’s coldness, his perceived lack of appetite, he slashed that fantasy open and made me bleed on the floor for daring to be so na?ve.
The room, full of laughter and knives-drawn politeness, faded away. The world narrowed to the two of us, a silent dare strung taut between incisor and jugular.
“Always thought you Romanovs had a thing for gold,” I said, my voice sugary sweet, but laced with venom.
His expression didn’t change, but his thumb pressed a hair deeper into my pulse.
“Gold’s for graves,” he murmured. “Obsidian’s for the living.”
If anyone in the room noticed that Arrow Romanov was on the verge of licking my pulse, they pretended not to. In our world, power shifted by degrees, not by declarations.
This was the closest thing to foreplay I could expect before being fucked for a lifetime.
He lingered long enough to make me sweat, straightened, and went to his seat.
His posture was so rigid that it dared anyone to question who owned what.
The table stumbled back into conversation.
No one looked at me. No one looked at Arrow, either, except Frank.
He flashed me a look—half pride, half warning—and sipped his gin. I knew what it meant.
“That’s the last time you’ll outmaneuver him in the open. Next time, he’ll drag you into the dark and deal with you there.”
The rest of the evening pirouetted around us, the table pivoting any time we moved or glanced up, as if we were gravitational—their next war, merger, or contract growing like a tumor behind our smiles.
He didn’t touch me again, but he didn’t need to; everyone already saw whose name was written on my neck.
Faces came and went, toasting our “happiness” with dead-eyed cheer. Every time I finished a drink, another appeared at my elbow. I wondered if Arrow was keeping track, measuring my limits the way hunters watched deer stagger and graze before the cull.
I knew he was watching, and I made a show of drinking past my capacity, daring him to see how far I’d go before I ruined everything.
Afterwards, Frank saw me to the car. I expected Arrow to claim me and haul me away as his prize, but he didn’t.
Instead, he lingered inside, hands tucked in his suit pockets, mouth twisted in a polite smile while he spoke in undertones to my father.
I couldn’t parse the words, but I recognized the cold efficiency of a man arranging a business deal.
The laughter punctuated the conversation, which was mean and edged—a joke where the punchline was always blood.
Frank loaded me into the back seat and slammed the door with a little more force than necessary.
The car smelled like new leather and cigarettes.
He got behind the wheel, checked the mirrors, and checked them again.
I slouched into the upholstery and watched raindrops chase each other across the tinted glass, little wars and peace treaties in microcosm.
We didn’t speak. Not until he pulled into the driveway. Then he looked back at me, eyes shadowed and careful.
“You want to run?” he asked in a voice I almost didn’t recognize.
I let the silence balloon before puncturing it. “What would you do if I said yes?”
He rolled a fat thumb against the steering wheel. “Wouldn’t do you any good, Principessa.* They’d catch you in a day.”
“Would you tell him where I went?”
I didn’t mean my father.
Frank considered for a long time, and in that time, I saw the man who let my brother sneak out at night, who delivered coded warnings in the form of children’s stories.
“I would,” he said. “And then I’d follow and make sure he didn’t kill you.”
I laughed, but it came out raw. “What makes you so sure he wouldn’t?”
“Not everyone is your father.”
Maybe I believed him. Maybe I didn’t. Either way, I brushed my hair out of my face and shouldered open my door.
I didn’t sleep that night. I ran a hot bath, watched my skin turn pink, and reviewed every brush of Arrow’s jaw and syllable he’d spoken—how he’d made a dog collar sound like a wedding ring.
I imagined him in my room, how he would look uncaged, with his suit peeled off and his true self revealed, not that it mattered.
I already knew the shape of people like Arrow.
At the edges, there was always violence, and underneath, only emptiness.
Taking the Cartier collar off, I spun it between my hands.
Obsidian reflected nothing. Not fire, not skin, not the tremors in my pulse. I tried smashing it against the marble, but it was built for forever, or at least long enough to choke someone properly. I thought about swallowing it whole.
Maybe then, the thing that owned me would kill me from the inside. More likely, it would sit there undigested, as a silent reminder.
The wedding was set for the end of October. The invitations were black and silver, embossed with a glittering Romanov crest.
I pretended not to notice the snickering, the glances over champagne at every social event in Manhattan.
“Virelli’s daughter’s getting put to stud like a prize filly,” someone said at a party, and I only smiled, licked salt off the rim of a Gold Rush, and watched the girl who’d said it shoot me an anxious glance before disappearing into the powder room.
They were scared of me, but even more scared of Arrow.
The world had learned to be scared of men long before it bothered to be scared of monsters.
Meanwhile, Arrow kept his distance, which made it worse.
I craved the confrontation. I needed to sharpen myself against him.
He never called, though. Never texted. Didn’t even stalk my socials, which I monitored obsessively under burner profiles, scrolling for traces of him and finding none. A part of me respected the absence. Another part wanted to hunt him down and shove the Cartier collar to his mouth until he choked.
My father hired a wedding planner to “minimize drama.” She was an artfully Botoxed wasp whom nothing could ruffle, not even the ongoing process of designing my wedding dress out of vengeance and Italian duchess satin. Her name was Mrs. Montalto, and each time I rebelled, she produced a new threat.
“If you don’t show up for the cake tasting, Arrow will pick the flavor for you.”
I made it my private mission to frustrate her at every opportunity.
At our fourth fitting, I brought a bottle of limoncello and a pair of kitchen shears, and performed a live amputation on the dress’s fondant-pearl “train,” just to see if she’d cry.
She didn’t.
Instead, she said, “I’ll order extra,” and made a note.