Ruthless Claim (Vows of Violence #2)

1. Valentina

VALENTINA

The cathedral smells like incense and the slow, dignified death of everything I ever wanted my life to look like.

I’m standing in the vestibule in eleven thousand dollars worth of Vera Wang silk, holding a bouquet of white peonies that I chose myself because if I’m going to be executed I’m at least going to have nice flowers.

The organ plays something appropriately solemn beyond the closed doors.

I cannot do this.

I have to do this.

I genuinely cannot do this.

This has been my internal monologue ever since I opened that letter that spelled out my doom.

Leo is standing beside me in a fitted Armani tuxedo, and he is trying very hard not to look at me like I’m walking to my own execution, which is thoughtful of him and also not working at all.

He keeps looking at me in these sideways glances like he’s checking to see if I’m bolting yet, which I notice every time and choose not to acknowledge.

Because if I acknowledge it I’m going to have to talk about it, and if I talk about it I’m going to have to feel it, and I don’t have time to feel it right now.

I need to get through the next four hours first. Then I can feel things.

I adjust the sweep of my veil with fingers that are steady because I have spent twenty-six years making sure my hands are always steady. I look at the closed cathedral doors, and I breathe.

The dress is perfect. I know this because I have the kind of self-awareness that other people mistake for vanity.

But it’s not vanity, it’s inventory.

My dark brown hair has been pinned at the sides by an artist and left to fall past my shoulders in waves, my makeup is the result of forty minutes of work specifically engineered to look effortless, and the dress fits my figure perfectly.

I know I look gorgeous, and I have no problem admitting it because false modesty wastes everyone’s time. I look exactly like a Santoro bride should look on her wedding day.

I just happen to be marrying the wrong fucking man.

I had dreams about this when I was a child.

The dress, the cathedral, the flowers. A man at the end of the aisle who was looking at me like I was the only thing in the room worth looking at.

Funny how that part didn’t make it into the final version.

“You look beautiful,” Leo says quietly, and I can hear everything he isn’t saying underneath it. The apology. The guilt of “I’m sorry, Val, I didn’t know it would come to this. I would have stopped it if I could.” And maybe that’s even true. I don’t know anymore.

“I know,” I say, because it’s true and because saying thank you feels too soft for today. Leo’s mouth almost twitches like he wants to smile then thinks better of it.

The doors open.

Three hundred people turn to look at me, which is a thing I am entirely accustomed to and normally enjoy.

Right now I feel like an animal being walked into an auction ring. But I lift my chin, find my smile, and I take the first step because that is what Santoro women do.

We don’t flinch.

We don’t show weakness.

We don’t let anyone see us bleed, even when we’re bleeding.

Cillian Brennan looms at the end of the aisle. I hate him so much.

He’s standing at the altar, looking like he’s made his peace with an unpleasant situation and is simply waiting for it to be over.

Those ice-blue eyes find me the second the doors open and he watches my approach, completely devoid of anything resembling feeling.

He looks good, which is deeply, cosmically unfair, and I am logging a formal complaint with the universe about it at the earliest opportunity.

The auburn hair, the sharp jaw, the broad shoulders filling out a very well-cut tuxedo.

He’s truly a handsome man, which is fifty shades of bullshit.

The scar on his cheek catches the candlelight, and I know from the photographs in his file that it creases into something that looks almost like a dimple when he nearly smiles, which is the kind of detail that should be illegal on someone so insufferable.

Cillian Brennan was interesting to me once.

And only from a purely physical aspect.

He’s good looking and I have eyes.

I found him interesting for maybe sixty seconds before he handed me a cream envelope and opened his big fucking mouth.

Then, that interest died a very painful death.

Leo’s arm is solid under my hand the entire walk down the aisle. I keep my eyes on the altar and my smile serene, my steps measured, and I think about all the things I’m going to do once this is over.

Not to Cillian. Just…all the ways I’m going to make the best of this. I am a Santoro and Santoros survive everything, including apparently this.

We reach the altar. Leo squeezes my arm once. Are you sure?

I squeeze back. Do I have a choice?

He doesn’t have a response for that, because we both already know the answer, so he does the thing I’ve been quietly dreading since the moment this was arranged.

He places my hand in Cillian’s with the solemnity of a man completing a transaction he hates but understands the necessity of.

I feel Cillian’s fingers close around mine and I think: there it is. Done. No going back now.

His hand is rough, his fingers having calluses that denote a lifetime of doing things that leave marks. Board-room men don’t have hands like this. I know exactly what his hands have done.

His thumb presses briefly against my pulse point just for a second, then it’s gone. I tell myself it was involuntary, but I’m not so sure I believe it.

Up close he smells like expensive soap and something woodsy underneath it, and I am not noticing that. I am not noticing any of this.

The priest begins speaking.

It’s something in Latin first, then English, about the sacred covenant of marriage and love and honor and cherishing one another, and I stand here in my four-thousand-dollar shoes and I do what I always do during speeches I cannot bear.

I alphabetize things in my head.

Today I’m going through the last twenty years of Hermes purses—of which I have multiple—and it’s getting me through this with some semblance of dignity.

“Do you, Valentina Isabelle Santoro, take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband—”

“I do,” I say coldly before he’s finished the sentence. Cillian’s jaw tightens minutely at the tone, and I feel a flicker of something I’m choosing to call satisfaction.

“Do you, Cillian James Brennan, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife—”

“I do.” His brogue coats the words and somehow makes them sound like a challenge. Or a warning. With him, I’m learning, those are probably the same thing.

“—husband and wife,” the priest says, and something in my chest shifts into a grief I do not have the capacity to handle for right now and am saving for later, much later, alone, with a very good bottle of wine.

Cillian turns to me. I have braced for this moment—the kiss, the thing we have to do for all these fucking witnesses and an alliance—and I have decided I will be completely neutral about it. It will be a handshake.

A formality. I will not react.

He tilts my chin up with one finger and he studies me with cold blue eyes.

His mouth meets mine and it is brief and cold and completely, thoroughly perfunctory.

It’s like kissing a fucking fish, and when he pulls back his eyes meet mine and his expression is closed off. I imagine mine looks identical.

“Mrs. Brennan,” he says, quietly enough that only I hear it, and somehow manages to load my new name with so much contempt.

“Mr. Brennan.” I give him the smile my mother once described as alarming in formal settings. “Shall we?”

He tucks my arm through his and we turn to face the congregation, who are applauding our union, and I smile, genuinely gracious, the performance of a lifetime.

I feel his grip on my arm—just shy of too tight, the pressure slightly deliberate, and I make sure to dig my nails just slightly into his arm.

We walk back down the aisle.

I am perfect and composed and I am absolutely going to make his life a living hell.

The Plaza ballroom is magnificent and I don’t care even slightly.

In another world, I would admire the crystal chandeliers and abundance of flowers.

I would enjoy a band that’s very good at playing upbeat music.

But right now, it means nothing to me.

There are hundreds of guests in their best clothes eating the best food and drinking the best wine, and I wish I were anywhere else.

The room is beautiful and it is a cage, and the difference between those two things is something I’ve been contemplating my entire life.

I smile through the receiving line, which lasts forty-five minutes because apparently every Brennan soldier from here to Boston decided tonight was the night to introduce themselves to me.

They come through in waves; big men with hard faces who look at me like I’m a tasty slab of meat.

I shake every hand and say the right things and meet every gaze and I don’t flinch once, because I was raised for exactly this and I am very good at it. I keep a mental ledger of every face and name because information is armor and I am in hostile territory.

Then I see Connor Brennan across the room, and I feel something not quite anger but close to it building in me.

Connor stands near the bar with the ease of a man who is entirely comfortable in any room he walks into while his wallflower of a wife, Teresa, sits at a nearby table, looking longingly at Emma.

He’s deep in conversation with someone who I don’t recognize and he looks…relaxed. Content, even.

He has the posture of a man attending a celebration he’s pleased with, a man whose plans are coming together exactly as intended.

I look at Emma.

Emma is sitting at a table with Leo, seven months pregnant and radiant in a deep green dress that makes her eyes look even more striking than usual.

Her dark auburn hair is swept up into a low chignon and she keeps brushing away her curtain bangs that fall into her face.

She’s laughing at something Leo said and her whole face lights up, those green eyes bright, the flush she always gets when she’s happy high in her cheeks.

And Connor Brennan is not looking at her at all, not caring that his wife clearly wants to be with her daughter.