Chapter 16
PIETRO
“Son, do you have a minute?”
I knew it sounded like a question, but coming from my father, the controlled tone left very little room for argument.
“I’m actually looking for Emily.”
I loved my family, but we were a lot. I had wanted her to see them, to see the devotion my father had for my mother and the love that lived at the center of this house, proof that even men with blood on their hands could still become good husbands and fathers.
I had wanted her to understand that I could make her happy.
That did not mean I wanted her left alone with the full force of a Benetti family gathering before she had finished digesting breakfast.
“Emily is just fine, Pietro,” my father said. “She’s with your mother and sister in the winter garden. Lily decided she couldn’t leave her alone with Victoria to overwhelm her future daughter-in-law.”
He shot me a sidelong look full of long-suffering annoyance.
“Thank you for that, by the way.”
I shrugged, feeling only the faintest trace of guilt.
The day before, when I watched Emily disappear upstairs with Victoria and my mother, I had told them the truth with perhaps less restraint than usual: that I intended to make her my wife.
My mother had been delighted.
My father had been rather less so.
And I had the distinct impression the explanation for that difference was about to arrive now.
I sighed. “Fine.”
I followed him to his office.
“Drink?”
I raised an eyebrow. “It’s not even lunchtime.”
My father kept his eyes on me as he poured himself a tall glass anyway.
Ah.
So it was going to be that kind of conversation.
I waited until he had taken his seat across from me, then crossed one leg over the other and rested my ankle on my knee.
“So.”
He let the silence stretch, then nodded once. “Marriage. Don’t you think it’s a little soon? You’ve known her, what, five minutes?”
“Five months,” I corrected. “And when you know, you know.”
“As a normal man, perhaps.” His gaze stayed on mine. “Not in our world.”
I frowned. “What makes it so different?”
He scoffed softly. “Don’t insult me by pretending to be na?ve. I know you asked your uncle to investigate her.”
“I also asked him to stop,” I said, more defensively than I intended. The shame of that still sat badly with me.
“Foolish of you,” he said. Then, after a beat, “I asked him to keep going.”
That gave me pause. I studied his face, trying to decide whether he was mocking me.
“You had no right.”
“Of course I did.” His tone never rose. It didn’t need to. “I keep my family safe. You are my son. My heir. I never had the moral hesitation you’re currently displaying, and sooner or later, neither will you.”
I shook my head. “You don’t know her.”
“Maybe I know more than you think.” He tapped a hand lightly against the leatherbound history of Sicily Emily had given him, and the motion made something tighten in my chest. The gift was perfect.
Thoughtful without trying too hard. Exactly right.
“She’s kind. She’s intelligent. She very obviously loves you.
Her present alone told me enough to know she pays attention. ”
The corner of his mouth moved, just barely.
“But when you announced you intended to marry her and, more importantly, follow her to Seattle without knowing what might be waiting for you there?—”
“An angry ex,” I cut in. “She told me that, and?—”
“Did she also tell you,” my father interrupted evenly, “that the man’s father is on the Albanians’ books?”
That stopped me for a second.
Then certainty returned.
“She doesn’t know.”
“No,” he said. “She probably doesn’t. But now you do, and you may do with that information whatever you like.”
I stood before he had even finished speaking.
That, more than the interruption itself, seemed to surprise him. I had never risen against him like that before. Never cut across him in his own office. Today was different. He was no longer correcting me. He was trespassing on a choice I had already made.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and my voice was respectful but hard, “but there seems to be a misunderstanding. You appear to think I came here seeking your approval.”
He looked up at me. “Didn’t you?”
I shook my head. “No. I brought her here out of respect. To show you who I chose. And to show her what life with me could actually look like if she chooses me back. Your approval would be welcome. It is not required.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, Father. It is.”
He held my gaze as he took a slow sip of his drink, and I would swear on my life I saw the corner of his mouth lift.
“Good.”
I stared at him. “Good?”
“Yes.” He set the glass down. “Because trust me, you are nowhere near the hard part yet.”
The office seemed to still around his voice.
“Wait until she sees your hands covered in blood for the first time,” he said.
“Literally or otherwise. Wait until you watch the light in her eyes dim, if only for a while. Wait until you understand that no matter how much she loves you, and no matter how much you love her, there will always be a part of her that can never again look at you with the same innocence she had before.”
My jaw tightened. “This?—”
“It will happen, Pietro.” The certainty in his tone was worse than anger. “No matter how much you want to believe it won’t. Wait until the day you lie to her in good conscience and break one of those beautiful promises I’m sure you’ve already made.”
I stared at him. “How do you know what promises I made her?”
He let out a low laugh, but there was no mockery in it. Only fatigue.
“Because we all make them,” he said. “At least the men who still think of themselves as decent. And we mean them when we say them. You do too. Right now, you probably think you are better than me. Better than Hoka. That you’ve seen the mistakes, learned the lessons, and you and Emily will be different. ”
He finished his drink and gestured vaguely toward the door.
“You think this family you brought her here to admire, this peace, this order, this love, was easy to build?”
I said nothing.
His smile sharpened slightly when my silence answered for me. “You are not nearly as unreadable as you imagine, son. The players change. The game does not.”
He turned the glass once between his fingers before setting it down.
“It was not easy to protect your mother. It was not easy to build this life around her, and it is not easy now. Loving me did not suddenly make everything simple for her. There are parts of what I am she still has to see past, no matter how much she loves me.” His gaze held mine.
“The bond has to be strong. Strong enough to survive the rest. And it is always harder when the woman is an outsider.” He let that settle before adding, more quietly, “That is why I pushed you toward Lucia Martelli. I wanted, for once, for something in your life to be easy.”
I stared at him. “I find the hypocrisy staggering.”
One dark brow lifted. “Hypocrisy?”
“You chose a woman from outside our world yourself.”
“I did not choose Lily,” he said, and for the first time there was something colder in his voice. “Not like that. The feelings were there, yes, but I stayed away. She witnessed something she never should have seen, and after that the choice was no longer mine alone.”
“Right,” I said. “How convenient. Yet you still kept her.”
“Yes,” he said. “And I have spent every day since making sure she had no reason to regret it.”
He sighed then and set the glass back down on his desk.
“The choice is made now,” he said. “It won’t take long for Matteo to find out, if he doesn’t already know, and then you’ll have to face him, his questions, and all the disillusionments that come after, one by one.”
“Consider me warned.”
He stood and adjusted his jacket with the same calm precision he brought to everything. “I only wanted you to be happy, but I suppose there is too much of me in you for that to come easily. Fine. Let’s go find our women before your mother organizes a wedding you haven’t even asked for.”
Yet.
The word passed through my head so clearly that I almost felt it leave my mouth.
My father looked at me for one unreadable second. “Yet.”
I hated that he knew me so well.
The winter garden sat at the back of the house under a high glass ceiling veiled faintly by the gray light of late afternoon.
Even at the end of November it was green there, warm enough for life to keep insisting on itself.
My mother liked to say it was the only room in the house where power forgot to posture for a while.
We found them near the far end.
Emily sat on one of the pale sofas between my mother and Victoria, a cup of tea in her hand and a look on her face I had not expected to see so soon in this house.
Ease.
Not complete, perhaps. Not unconscious. But real.
Victoria was in the middle of explaining something with all the gravity of a diplomat at peace talks, hands moving as she spoke.
My mother was half listening, half smiling in that soft, amused way she had whenever my sister was winding herself up to some elaborate conclusion.
And Emily, my Emily, was looking between them with warmth in her eyes and her shoulders relaxed, her laugh arriving low and easy as if she had belonged in that corner of the room far longer than a single morning.
I stopped without meaning to.
For one brief second, the full weight of what I had asked of her settled in my chest with brutal clarity.
Not just to love me.
To walk toward this.
Toward my family, my name, my world, with all its beauty and all its rot so tightly knotted together that sometimes even I no longer knew where one ended and the other began.
There was no regret in me. None.
Only certainty.
She was exactly the right woman.
And that made the fear sharper, not weaker. Standing there and watching her with the people I loved most, looking so alive and real and entirely herself, I felt a quiet, terrible conviction move through me.
This world did not deserve her.
My father glanced at me and, because he was my father, saw too much at once. I caught the knowing look he sent my way and hated him for it on principle.
I looked back toward Emily before he could say anything.
She turned at that exact moment, as if she had felt me there all along, and the smile that touched her mouth when she saw me was enough to make every warning my father had just given me feel very far away.
Victoria spotted us next.
“There you are,” she announced, as though our absence had been a personal failing. “Emily says my doll ranking system is intellectually valid.”
“I said it was impressively structured,” Emily corrected, though she was laughing as she said it.
“Same thing.”
My mother looked up then and her expression held too much understanding in it when it landed on me. Dad moved no closer, but I could feel him at my shoulder all the same, a silent witness to whatever choice I was about to make.
Emily stood as I came nearer, setting her tea down on the little table beside her.
“Is everything okay?” she asked quietly.
The question was simple. Careful. Open.
And for one suspended second, the truth stood there between us, fully formed and waiting. Adam. The Albanians. The risk my father had placed in my hands like a test I had already failed before I knew I was taking it.
I should have told her then, while she was looking at me like that, with trust still warm in her face and her hand already half reaching for mine.
But my mother was there. Victoria was there.
The house was warm, the winter garden all glass and green around us, and Emily had only just begun to relax inside it.
I did not want to put fear back into her eyes.
Not there. Not yet. Not while she was standing in the middle of my family and choosing, however carefully, to remain.
So I smiled.
“Perfect,” I said.
She stepped closer and slipped her hand into mine, and I closed my fingers around hers automatically, hating the way the lie had already made itself useful.
That was the worst part.
Victoria, oblivious as ever, looked between us and made a face. “Disgusting.”
“Vicky,” my mother said.
“What? It is.”
Emily laughed softly and leaned into my side just enough that I could feel the warmth of her through my shirt.
My father said nothing.
He did not need to.
I could feel the weight of his knowing look without turning to meet it, and I hated that too, because he had been right. Not about Emily. Never about her. But about this. About how quickly love and fear and good intentions could twist themselves into silence.
I looked down at her hand in mine and understood, with a clarity that settled cold and heavy in my chest, that the moment had already passed.
The truth had been there.
I had seen it.
And I had not chosen it.