Chapter 1
Crow
Reaper slid the survey map across the table like it was a losing hand of cards, which, in a way, it was.
"Ardente's filed for a coastal access variance," he said. "Cliff path, the vineyard terraces, all of it. If they get the villa parcel, they get frontage clear from the lido to the harbor mouth."
I looked at the map for a long time before I said anything.
That's the job. Everyone else in this club reacts first and thinks later — Diesel included, and he'd tell you that himself, proudly — but somebody has to be the one who looks at a map and sees five moves ahead instead of the one right in front of him.
"That's our supply road," I said finally. "If they close public access to that stretch, every delivery we run north has to go through town, past the carabinieri post, twice the eyes on every truck."
"That's the problem," Reaper agreed. "Here's the other problem."
He tapped a small rectangle on the map, tucked against the cliff edge like it was hiding from the ocean. A villa. Vineyard rows stitched around it in the survey's flat gray lines, nothing at all like what they actually looked like from the water — green and silver and completely alive.
"Moretti place," I said. "Old woman died in the spring. I remember the funeral. Half the harbor showed up."
"Granddaughter inherited it. Isla Moretti.
" Reaper said the name like it was a piece to a puzzle he hadn't finished assembling.
"Except the will's got a catch. She's got ninety days to get married or the whole thing gets sold to the trust, and the trust's already got Ardente's number on speed dial. "
I sat back.
"You're telling me the fate of our supply route is currently hanging on one woman's love life."
"I'm telling you," Reaper said, "that if that land sells to Ardente, we lose the cliff road, and if we lose the cliff road, we're running product through town every single week until somebody notices. That's not a maybe. That's a matter of time."
Saint, who'd been quiet in the corner nursing a coffee like it owed him money, finally spoke up. "So what, we buy the villa?"
"She's not selling," Reaper said. "Woman turned down three offers from the trust's broker before she even knew Ardente was behind it. She wants to keep it. She just doesn't have a husband lying around."
Everyone at the table looked at me.
I want to be clear about something. I have made a lot of decisions in this club that other men wouldn't have made, decisions that required me to be colder than felt natural, more patient than felt human, because somebody in this life has to run the numbers while everyone else runs on instinct.
I have never once regretted being that guy.
I regretted it a little, right then, watching four sets of eyebrows climb toward four hairlines.
"No," I said.
"You didn't even let me finish," Reaper said.
"You don't have to finish. I can see the whole sentence coming from here like a truck with no brakes." I stood up, because sitting down suddenly felt like agreeing to something. "You want me to marry a stranger to save a supply road."
"I want you to propose a solution that solves two problems with one signature," Reaper said, entirely too calm about it. "The land stays out of Ardente's hands. She keeps her grandmother's villa. We keep the cliff road. Everybody wins."
"Except the two people who now have to be married," I said.
"You don't actually have to be married," Saint pointed out, unhelpfully. "You just have to be engaged with a wedding date. You could drag your feet on the wedding part indefinitely. Very on brand for you, honestly."
"Thank you, Saint, for that character assessment."
"I'm just saying. You've been dodging Marta at The Anchor for two years using nothing but eye contact management. You have a gift."
I ignored that, mostly because it was true.
Here's the thing about me that people get wrong. They think because I run the numbers, because I'm the one who sits back and calculates the angle instead of throwing the first punch, that I don't feel anything about any of it. That's not it. I feel things. I just don't let them drive.
Marriage — even a fake one, even a business arrangement dressed up in a white dress for optics — was not a spreadsheet problem. It was a person's life. Somebody's actual, entire life, tangled up with mine on paper in front of a priest and a town full of people who'd remember it forever.
"Find another way," I said.
"There isn't one," Reaper said. "I've had Saint on the zoning board for two weeks.
There's no appeal, no loophole, no other parcel we can leverage.
The only lever on this board is her deadline, and the only person who can pull it without it looking suspicious as hell is somebody with a plausible reason to marry a woman he's never met. "
"And that's me."
"That's you," Reaper said. "You've got no wife, no girlfriend, no complications, and you're the only one at this table who could sell a fake engagement without accidentally starting an actual bar fight over it."
Diesel, across the table, raised a hand like he was in school. "For the record, I resent that."
"You proposed to your barista once as a joke and she called the police," Reaper said, without even looking at him.
"That was a misunderstanding."
"You were holding a ring pop."
I let them go back and forth, because it gave me a minute to actually think, which is the one thing I am always better positioned to do than any of them.
Here's what I knew, running the numbers the way I always did: the club needed that road.
The club had needed that road since before I was patched in, since Reaper's father ran this territory and used the same cliff path to move product his own way, and losing it wasn't a minor inconvenience, it was a structural failure with a timeline attached.
Ninety days wasn't a long runway. It was barely enough to solve a problem this size through any legitimate channel.
And there was a version of this that wasn't insane. A contract. Clean terms. An arrangement between two adults who both understood exactly what it was and exactly what it wasn't, with an exit built in from day one so nobody got left holding something they didn't sign up for.
I could design that. I was, in fact, extremely good at designing exactly that kind of thing.
"I need to meet her first," I said.
Reaper's mouth did the thing it does when he thinks he's already won and is trying not to look smug about it. "Tomorrow. The Anchor. Noon."
"You already set this up."
"I had a hunch," Reaper said. "You always come around to the math eventually."
I drove up the coast road the next morning with the windows down, going over what I'd say, because I don't walk into anything without a plan, not even lunch.
Especially not lunch that was actually a business proposal disguised as a first date disguised as a rescue mission for a woman who had no idea I existed yet.
The Anchor sat right on the harbor, its blue awning faded the same color as everything on this coast eventually faded, salt and sun working on paint and people alike until everything wore the same soft, weathered patience.
I got there early. I always get there early.
Being early is just another way of controlling the variables.
She was already there.
I knew it was her before anyone told me, because she was sitting at the corner table with a stack of paper in front of her — deeds, I'd learn later, and receipts, and a legal pad covered in handwriting so aggressive it had nearly torn through in three places — and she had the specific expression of a person doing long division in her head while also being furious about it.
Dark hair pulled back in a knot that had given up an hour ago.
A sundress that looked like it had been picked out for comfort and not for impressing anyone, which I appreciated, because I wasn't there to be impressed.
And an expression, when she finally looked up and clocked me walking toward her table, that shifted in about half a second from tired to guarded to something sharper that I'd later learn was her default setting whenever a strange man approached her with a purpose.
"If you're another one of the trust's lawyers," she said, before I'd even reached the table, "I've already told your firm no. Twice. In writing."
"I'm not a lawyer."
"Good. Then whatever you're selling, I don't want it."
"I haven't offered anything yet."
"You will," she said. "Everyone does, eventually. Villa, vineyard, sea view — it's a very popular listing this month, apparently, despite not being for sale."
I pulled out the chair across from her without being invited, which got me a look that could have stripped paint, and sat down anyway.
"Roman," I said. "People call me Crow."
"People call you Crow," she repeated, flat. "Like the bird."
"Like the bird."
"Is that a club thing? I've heard about the club. Big leather jackets, motorcycles, very committed to the aesthetic of nineteen fifty-five."
"It's a club thing," I said, and let a small amount of amusement show, because I could already tell that being visibly unimpressed by her wasn't going to work, and being visibly amused might. "You've got good instincts. Most people don't clock it that fast."
"Most people don't grow up watching half the harbor's business get conducted out of the back room of a bar their whole life." She set down her pen with deliberate precision, like she was setting down a weapon she'd decided not to use yet. "So, Roman-who-people-call-Crow. What do you want."
"I want to talk about your grandmother's will."
Something in her face closed like a shutter. "Of course you do."
"Not like that." I held up a hand. "I'm not here on behalf of the trust, or Ardente, or anybody trying to take that villa from you.
I'm here because my club needs that cliff road to stay out of Ardente's hands just as badly as you need to keep your grandmother's house, and I think there's a version of this where we both get what we need. "