14. Fourteen
FOURTEEN
HARLOWE
Frank was waiting in the foyer when I got home, with his beefy arms folded. “Come,” he said. “Your father wants to see you.”
Too tired for theatrics, I followed. Giovanni Virelli sat in his study, not looking up as I entered. The gold fountain pen marked his place in the ledger—pages that bled names, not currency.
“Sit.”
The smells of ink and old leather were so familiar. For a second, I was eight again, the na?ve child with a secret stash of lemon drops in my lap, learning to count debts.
Giovanni set his pen aside. “What is this I’ve been hearing about you being exceptionally difficult for your fiancé?”
I shrugged. “He was bored, so I made things interesting.”
Two knuckles rapped the blotter. Sharp. I flinched.
“This is not interesting, Harlowe. It makes you stupid, and it makes me look like a fool. I will not have my daughter jeopardizing the deal I have made with the Romanovs.”
I smiled, gritting my teeth. “You made a deal with the monsters that killed my brother. You did, Father. Not me.”
“You’ve become too defiant—too out of control.”
There was a familiar tick in his jaw, the one I recognized as the prelude to violence.
He moved from behind his desk, and the sound of his hand across my cheek was immediate.
My head snapped to the side, cheek burning, eyes watering from the impact.
Copper flooded my mouth. It wasn’t the first time he’d done it, but it landed differently now.
When he caught my chin in his fist, I met his stare.
“You’ll behave until your wedding,” Giovanni hissed. “After that, you’re his problem. But until then, you are still my daughter, and I will not have the city questioning my control.”
Giovanni released my chin. Instead of leaving, he pressed his lips to my temple, a gesture more priestly than fatherly, and straightened the lapel of my shirt, careful to avoid the marks he’d just left.
“Do not embarrass this family with your base appetites or your schoolgirl rebellion. I raised you better.”
I almost laughed in his face. My loyalty, my wounds, my filth, every last part of me was his handiwork. But I just nodded and wrenched myself out of his grip, ignoring the way my skin spasmed where he’d held me.
“Can I go?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
He moved to the window and watched a ghostly war play out on the manicured lawn. For a moment, he said nothing, and that was far, far worse than rage.
“When I was young,” my father began, his back still turned, “I believed an empire was built on men. Loyalty. Guns. Brotherhood.” He paused, letting the words curdle.
“It isn’t. It’s built on what you can endure.
” He faced me; his eyes were stone-cold.
“Your mother, she knew this. That’s why she isn’t here now. ”
Rage caught fire in my chest. “She’s not here now because you killed her.” The words flew out, a sickle meant to wound, and it landed. He flinched, ever so slightly. “She’s dead because her husband is a coward.”
He came across the room in two steps, and the second slap landed harder. My knees hit the Persian rug, hands braced against the floor. Crimson dripped from my lip onto the intricate pattern.
“Get up.”
I didn’t move.
Then, slowly, I moved. Knees first. Then feet. Swaying. My father’s face was a mask of controlled fury, the kind that sent men to early graves.
“She killed herself,” he hissed. “She chose it. She was the one who abandoned her family.”
“Maybe she was the bravest one in this family. Maybe she’s the only one you couldn’t break.” I spat the line, too fast and too sharply, and for a second, the mask flickered.
In that flash, I saw a man who’d mourned her so hard he tried to become the marble he buried her under.
His mouth, always a straight, unsmiling line, became a notch crueler.
“You think you’re safe because you wear my name, daughter? That you can play these games with men like Arrow Romanov, and what, he’ll bend under your little tricks? The tricks of a whore?”
He cocked his head to the side, the way he once did when I was seven and stole persimmons from the neighbor’s tree, only to puke them back onto his Italian loafers.
I was sure he’d lunge again and show me what happened to daughters who couldn’t be caged, but instead, he pressed both palms to the edge of the window.
“With men like Arrow, there is nothing but hunger and leverage.” He watched me with that hopeless, parental disgust men like him reserved for women who couldn’t be shamed. “You want to know what happens to girls who can’t be tamed, Harlowe? They become cautionary tales.”
Standing my ground, I didn’t dare flinch.
“Like mother, like daughter, I guess.”
“You are nothing like your mother,” he said with quiet venom. “She had grace. Dignity. She knew when to surrender.”
“Is that what you tell yourself?” I wiped blood from my lip. “That she surrendered?”
He looked away.
I refused to blink, refused to leave until he told me I could, because that was the only rebellion left in me. I’d drag the moment out until it hurt us both.
Eventually, he glanced at Frank, who hovered at the door, invisible as always. His grip found my arm—bruising—and he dragged me toward the door.
Frank stood in the hallway, face blank, hand hovering near his weapon.
“Take her to her room. Make sure she stays there,” my father said, his voice already fading back into business. “Arrow will be waiting for her at eight sharp. Lock the doors from the outside if you have to.”
My father turned his back to me, just like he always did when I found the nerve to hurt him back. Frank gave me a once-over and fixed me with a look that said, “There’s nothing left inside you to ruin, is there?”
He was right.
Frank met my eyes, and in the set of his jaw, the way his bald skull shone under the foyer’s crystal lamp, I saw how little even he could do now.
He ushered me into the corridor with a gentle hand at my elbow.
I let him guide me through the maze of hallways, past oil paintings of ancestors that looked like prizefighters caught mid-execution.
Once we were out of earshot, he said. “Why do you rile him up, Principessa?”
I watched the patterns in Frank’s tattoos shift as he squeezed my arm.
“Because it’s the only thing I have left to take from him,” I said, surprised by the honesty that came out of my mouth.
Frank scratched the underside of his jaw, running a thumb across the old scar that split his throat in a white, ropey line.
“Your father’s a wounded animal, Harlowe. He’s desperate.” His eyes softened. “Desperate men make dangerous deals.”
“Like selling their daughter to a Romanov?” I asked bitterly.
He left me at my bedroom door, like I was still a child waiting for a bedtime story instead of a woman being staged for a final performance.
As his footsteps faded down the hall, I pressed my forehead against the cool wood, the house trembling under the weight of secrets and unslept ghosts.
I stalked to the window, considering the drop. I remembered watching my brother scale the facade at midnight, a silk tie between his teeth, triggering every motion sensor to reach a girl he could have called on the phone.
“You always went for the hard entrance,” I muttered to his ghost. “And you ended up dead for the trouble.”
The memory lapped through me, old grief clawing at the insides.
Flicking through old texts from Luca, I read through every message, a fossilized joke or a threat crafted with the finesse only brothers possess.
I tried to remember his laugh and found I could only picture the last time I saw him alive—pockets full of bullets and a dumb, crooked smile as he dared me to race him up the east stairs before breakfast.
We’d accused each other of cheating so loudly that we woke up half the house, and Frank himself caught us ankle-deep in orange juice and swearing up a storm. I was always faster, only because he let me win, and he died without ever telling me so.
The last text message I received from him said, “Don’t ever make a deal you can’t run away from, H.”
At the time, we were talking about whether or not you could sneak out of Dad’s Christmas massacre and still score blunts from the Russian gang kids on the Lower East Side. I’d called him a coward. He’d called me a pipsqueak. We’d both agreed, finally, that nobody in our family got to run forever.
Tonight, it seemed, even that option was dead.
I stared at the screen, wishing the phone could conjure his voice and turn data into resurrection. Instead, it just made me lonelier. He was gone, and now I was the deal, packaged and branded for slaughter.
Tossing the phone beneath my pillow, I lay flat on the duvet. When I finally rolled over, the room was darker. I’d dozed off, and now the afternoon sun was sinking toward the horizon. I had maybe an hour before Arrow would arrive, expecting me to be dressed and ready like a good little wife-to-be.
I dressed in a wine-colored, long-sleeved dress with the high heels that Luca had bought me the last birthday I had before he was murdered.
Velvet straps twisted around my ankles, tying in a bow at the back.
After lining my eyes dark and bloody, I painted my lips with the kind of red that stains glass forever, leaving my ebony hair down.
Outside, the early-fall dark poured over Manhattan. My phone chimed.
Arrow.
This time, just a single word—a command—and nothing else.
Downstairs
I ignored it for a minute, walking to my window, scanning the ring of black SUVs that lined the driveway below. They all idled with their headlights on, exhaust bleeding into the fragile air.
Another text.
NOW.
If obedience were the game, I would lose it. That was the point.
But I had nowhere to run, not with the house sealed tighter than a saint’s tomb, and Frank stationed at the end of the hall in full-bodyguard mode, jaw ticking as he watched the seconds lurch by.
“I’m ready,” I told him.
The bruises were visible, and I didn’t fucking care.