Chapter 2 #2
The glass walls of the conservatory pressed in around me. Outside, the Long Island afternoon was gray and still, the kind of weather that made everything feel smaller than it was.
Tomorrow I would attend Vito Caruso's funeral.
I would wear a black Valentino dress and stand with my family and watch a man I'd never met be lowered into the ground.
And somewhere in that church, Dante Caruso would look at me for the first time and see exactly what my father saw: a bloodline. An alliance. A transaction.
I knew almost nothing about him. Photographs showed a serious man with dark hair and the kind of face that gave nothing away.
Thirty-four years old. Harvard Business School, though everyone knew that was mostly for show—what he'd really been studying all those years was how to run a criminal empire.
He'd taken over the family business now that his father was dead. The new don. My future husband.
I tried to imagine marrying him and couldn't. The concept refused to solidify into anything real. It was like trying to picture a color you'd never seen.
My phone buzzed. A text from Sofia: Fitting at 4. Don't be late.
The funeral dress. Of course. I had to be fitted for the dress I'd wear while meeting the man who would own me for the rest of my life.
I should have felt something. Anger, maybe, or grief, or the cold clarity of determination. Instead I felt hollow. Scraped clean. Like someone had reached inside me and scooped out everything that could protest or fight or hope.
This was always going to happen. I'd known that, somewhere beneath all my careful planning. The proposal had never been a real escape route—it had been a fantasy I'd constructed to survive the waiting. A story I told myself so I could keep getting out of bed in the morning.
The truth was simpler and worse: I had never had a chance.
I set the portfolio on the settee beside me.
All those numbers. All that work. In a week, or a month, or whenever the wedding was scheduled, none of it would matter.
I would belong to Dante Caruso, and my carefully researched distribution networks would become someone else's project or, more likely, no one's project at all.
A beautiful girl who stayed quiet. That's what I needed to be now.
I'd spent twenty-six years learning how to be exactly that, and I still wasn't sure I was good enough at it to survive.
The conservatory was getting cold. The afternoon light was fading. Somewhere in the house, Sofia would be setting up for my fitting, laying out the black dress and the black shoes and all the other costume pieces for tomorrow's performance.
I stood up and left the portfolio where it lay.
It didn't belong to me anymore.
Sofia's fingers were gentle in my hair, separating strands, twisting them into something elegant. I sat at my childhood vanity and watched a stranger take shape in the mirror.
Pale pink walls that I'd begged my father to let me repaint.
The canopy bed with its gauzy curtains, appropriate for a princess in a fairy tale, ridiculous for a grown woman.
Bookshelves lined with the novels I'd escaped into when reality became too heavy to carry—Jane Austen and the Brontes and all those stories where women found love and autonomy in the same package, as if such things existed outside of fiction.
The books were dusty now. I hadn't read for pleasure in years.
"Hold still, bella." Sofia pressed a pin into my scalp, securing another twist. "The updo frames your face beautifully. You have your mother's bone structure, you know. She would be so proud."
I made a sound that could have meant anything.
The funeral dress hung on the closet door, still in its garment bag.
Valentino. Black crepe, fitted through the bodice, a modest neckline that would photograph well in the church.
My father had ordered it through his personal shopper in Manhattan—one of those women who understood that "appropriate for a funeral" meant something different for families like ours.
The dress said grief. It also said money.
It also said look at me but don't look too closely.
Sofia unzipped the bag and lifted the dress free with the reverence of someone handling a religious artifact. "Try it on now, yes? We need to check the hem."
I stood and let her help me into it. The fabric was cool against my skin, sliding over my body like water, like something that wanted to own me. Sofia zipped the back and stepped away to assess her work.
"Perfetto." She clasped her hands together. "You look like a movie star. So elegant. So refined."
The mirror showed me a woman in black. Dark hair swept up, exposing the line of her neck. Eyes that reflected nothing. Cheekbones that caught the light exactly as they were supposed to.
This is what she's for.
The thought surfaced without warning, clear and cold as ice water.
Not her mind. Not her work. Not her ideas. Her face. Her bloodline. Her ability to stand beside a powerful man and make him look legitimate.
Sofia was adjusting the hem, kneeling at my feet with pins in her mouth, murmuring about quarter inches and the height of my heels. I stood perfectly still and let her work, the way I'd stood perfectly still for a hundred fittings before this one.
Another fitting surfaced in my memory. Ten years ago, almost exactly.
A red dress for the Valenti Christmas party—silk, backless, the kind of dress that made my father frown and say it was too mature for a girl my age.
But he'd let me wear it anyway because the Valentis were important and the party was important and I was already learning that being beautiful was a tool the family expected me to wield.
Enzo had noticed me across the ballroom. I remembered the exact moment our eyes met—the way his gaze had traveled down my body and back up, slow and deliberate, like he was memorizing me. He'd been forty-two years old. I'd been sixteen. I hadn't understood what that meant.
What I'd understood was that someone was finally seeing me.
He'd made his way through the crowd, smooth as a shark through water, and leaned down to whisper in my ear: "You're the most beautiful girl here. Do they know what they have?"
I'd blushed. I'd felt special. I'd felt chosen.
God, I'd been so young.
I remembered it so clearly. His hand on the small of my back. The weight of it, the warmth, the way it felt like a claim.
"You shouldn't be drinking," he'd said, his voice low and amused. "But I won't tell if you won't."
I'd felt so grown up. So special. Here was this powerful man, this friend of my father's, treating me like an equal. Like someone worth noticing.
That's how it started. Small attentions. A hand that lingered too long on my shoulder. Comments about how mature I was for my age, how different from other girls, how he could talk to me in ways he couldn't talk to anyone else.
The phone calls came next. Late at night, when my family was asleep, his voice in my ear like a secret we shared.
He told me things—about the business, about his marriage (unhappy, of course, his wife didn't understand him), about the loneliness of being a man in his position.
He made me feel like I was the only person who truly saw him.
I was sixteen years old and I believed every word.
The hotel room happened on a Thursday afternoon.
He'd sent a car for me, told me to tell my family I was shopping with friends.
The room was expensive and anonymous, all white sheets and heavy curtains, and he'd been so gentle at first. So careful to tell me this was special, I was special, what we had was different from anything else in his life.
I'd given him everything. My trust, my body, my belief in a future where someone powerful would choose me and keep me and love me the way I'd never been loved.
The shift was so gradual I didn't see it happening.
First it was my clothes. Too revealing, he said—did I want other men looking at me?
Then it was my friends. They were immature, they didn't understand what I was becoming, they would only hold me back.
Then it was my thoughts, my opinions, the way I laughed or the way I didn't laugh, the things I said and the things I failed to say.
Nothing I did was ever quite right. I was always disappointing him in small ways that accumulated into something enormous, something that pressed down on my chest until I couldn't breathe.
When I pleased him, his attention was a drug—warm and consuming and worth any price.
When I disappointed him, the coldness was absolute.
Hours of silence. Days, sometimes. He'd look through me like I wasn't there, like I was nothing, and I'd do anything to get the warmth back.
I was seventeen when it ended.
A party at the Rosetti estate. I'd been so excited—he'd finally agreed to be seen with me in public, to acknowledge that what we had was real. I'd worn a green dress that he'd chosen for me, styled my hair the way he liked, practiced my smile until it felt natural.
And then, in front of everyone—my father, my brothers, the heads of half a dozen families—he'd turned to Tomasso and said:
"She's a child. I don't know what you thought was happening, but I have no interest in your daughter."
The words had been casual. Almost bored. Like I was an inconvenience he was finally bothering to address.
I remembered the exact quality of the silence that followed.
The way people had looked at me—some with pity, some with contempt, some with the satisfied recognition of watching someone else's humiliation.
I remembered my father's face going hard and closed, calculating the damage to the family's reputation.
I remembered my brothers shifting uncomfortably, none of them defending me, all of them just waiting for the moment to pass.
I remembered realizing, with perfect clarity, that I was alone.
The therapist had called it grooming. She'd called it abuse. She'd explained, patiently and repeatedly, that what had happened wasn't my fault—that I'd been a child, that he'd been a predator, that the shame I carried didn't belong to me.
I understood all of that intellectually.
It didn't change the fact that tomorrow I would have to stand in the same room as him and pretend none of it had ever happened.
He would look at me, probably. That slow assessment, those pale eyes taking inventory of what I'd become.
He might even speak to me—something cordial and empty, the words of a man greeting a stranger.
And I would have to respond. I would have to smile.
I would have to act like my skin wasn't crawling, like my chest wasn't caving in, like the girl he'd broken wasn't still screaming somewhere inside me.
At the funeral I’d be caught between Enzo, a monster from my past, and Dante, a tyrant from my future.
Dante.
I'd met him once, I remembered suddenly.
A formal dinner between the families when I was twelve and he was twenty.
I'd been seated at the far end of the table, the youngest person in the room, invisible in the way children always were at those events.
Everyone had talked over me, around me, like I was furniture with a pulse.
Except him.
He'd asked me a question—something simple, something about what books I was reading—and actually waited for the answer.
I remembered being so startled that a grown-up was listening to me that I'd stammered through my response like an idiot.
But he hadn't laughed. He'd just nodded, said something about liking Jane Austen when he was younger, and gone back to the adult conversation.
It was such a small thing. Probably he didn't remember it at all.
But I did. I remembered that he'd been the only one in that room who'd treated me like a person instead of a decoration.
I pushed the memory away. It didn't matter.
Whatever kindness a twenty-year-old Dante Caruso had shown to a twelve-year-old girl had nothing to do with who he was now.
He was a mafia don. He was about to inherit me along with his father's empire.
Whatever gentleness he might have possessed had probably been beaten out of him by the same world that had taught me to disappear.
Men like him didn't marry for love. They married for power, for alliances, for the legitimacy that a well-bred wife could provide. That was what I was to him: a transaction. A bloodline wrapped in an acceptable package.
My only protection was to give him nothing real.
I would be the perfect wife. Beautiful, gracious, compliant. I would manage his household and attend his events and smile at his associates and warm his bed if he required it. I would be everything that was expected of a Moretti bride, everything my father had raised me to be.
But the real Gemma—whoever that even was anymore—would stay locked behind walls so thick that no one could breach them. Not Dante Caruso. Not Enzo Valenti. Not anyone.
I had learned what happened when you gave a powerful man access to your real self. I had learned what it cost to be known, to be seen, to believe that someone's attention meant something more than ownership. I would not make that mistake again.
He would not see me.