Chapter 5
CASSIA
The judge has tobacco-stained teeth and a voice like gravel scraping metal.
“Do you, Dante Marcello Santoro, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?”
I’m standing in the same study where I offered myself two hours ago. The afternoon light slants through the windows, turning dust motes to gold. Outside, birds are singing. All that brightness, and my lungs have gone shallow, my pulse thin and distant, my hands cold at my sides.
“I do.”
Two words. His voice doesn’t waver.
The judge turns to me. Watery eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. He’s been paid well to ask no questions, to file no public records until Dante says otherwise. That’s how things work in this world. Money buys silence. Power buys discretion.
“Do you, Cassia Renata Neri, take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?”
My hands are steady. I made sure of that before we started. Pressed my palms flat against my thighs until the trembling stopped. I will not shake in front of these people. I will not let them see what this is doing to me.
“I do.”
The words come out clear. Precise. The voice of a woman who knows what she’s agreeing to.
I don’t. But they don’t need to know that.
The ring is cold when he slides it onto my finger. Simple gold band, no stones. His hands are warm, steady, and he doesn’t look at me as he does it. Just efficient movement, a task being completed.
I notice there’s a stack of papers on the corner of the desk that aren’t aligned with the edge. Off by at least an inch. My fingers itch to straighten them.
Focus.
“By the power vested in me by the State of Louisiana, I now pronounce you husband and wife.”
Done.
Just like that. No fanfare. No rice. No first dance or champagne toast. Just a legal transaction completed in a study with four witnesses and a judge who’ll forget my face by the morning.
I’m a Santoro now.
My fingers find the gold band. The metal is warming against my skin, but the rest of me stays distant. Detached. Like watching someone else’s wedding through smudged glass.
Lorenzo steps forward to sign the marriage certificate.
His pen moves in quick, economical strokes.
He hasn’t spoken a single word since the ceremony began.
Hasn’t smiled, hasn’t frowned, hasn’t given me anything to read.
Just that flat, assessing stillness that makes my skin want to crawl off my bones.
Giada signs next. She’s beautiful in the way of women who’ve never had to try. Dark hair swept back, simple pearl earrings, a dress that costs more than my car. Next to her I’m wrinkled linen and bitten nails. But when she finishes signing, she catches my hand.
A squeeze. Brief. Warm.
Her eyes meet mine, the corners soft, her grip steady. Not pity. Not performance.
I don’t know what to do with that. I’m not used to people being warm without wanting something.
From the corner of the room, Nico smiles at me. It’s a nice smile, open and genuine, the kind that makes you want to smile back. So I do. Social response programmed into me after twenty-four years of making myself pleasant.
But his eyes don’t match his mouth. They’re narrowed at the edges, tracking me the same way I just took note of his sister’s unexpected kindness. He’s reading me like a balance sheet, looking for discrepancies.
I look away.
Marco stands by the door with his shoulders rigid and his jaw set. He wasn’t asked to witness. I noticed that. Lorenzo signed. Giada signed. The other two brothers just watched.
Giada catches his eye across the room, offers him a small nod. Marco holds her gaze, then drops it. Some silent sibling communication I can’t translate.
Marco doesn’t relax.
The judge gathers his papers, accepts an envelope I pretend not to see, and disappears with murmured congratulations that mean nothing.
The study empties, one sibling at a time.
Lorenzo first, as silent as he came. Nico with that unsettling smile still curving his lips.
Giada squeezes my hand again on her way out.
“Welcome to the family.”
Then she’s gone, and it’s just me and my husband in a room that smells like leather and old paper and jasmine from the garden below.
My husband.
God.
“Your parents,” Dante says. “You should call them.”
Not a suggestion. An instruction. He’s already crossing to the desk, picking up the phone, holding it out to me.
I don’t move.
“They’ll hear about it eventually,” he continues. “Better from you.”
He’s right. I know he’s right. But the thought of hearing my mother’s voice, of trying to explain this, makes my stomach clench.
I take the phone anyway.
The dial tone hums against my ear. I punch in the numbers I’ve known my whole life. One ring. Two.
“Neri residence.”
My mother. Her voice sounds hoarse, worn thin. She’s been crying.
“Mamma. It’s me.”
A sharp inhale. Then.
“Cassia? Cassia, where are you? Your father said you left without. We’ve been calling for hours.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” The words scrape on the way out. “I’m at the Santoro compound.”
Silence. The kind that stretches and warps, that turns seconds into small eternities while my mother’s breathing goes ragged on the other end.
“What?” Her voice has gone small. Confused.
“Why would you. Cassia, what have you done?”
“I married him, Mamma. Dante Santoro. It’s done.”
A wounded-animal noise tears through the receiver. Not a gasp, not a sob. Worse than both. It drives straight through my sternum.
“No. No, you didn’t. You couldn’t. Cassia, your sister was supposed to.”
“Elena ran.” My voice comes out flatter than I intended. “Someone had to fix it.”
“But not you.” She’s crying now, I can hear it, the wet hitches in her breathing. “Not my baby, not you, you weren’t supposed to.”
Weren’t supposed to what? Be worthy of trading?
My stomach drops. I press my teeth together until my jaw aches.
“Where’s Papa?”
A shuffling sound. Muffled voices.
Then my father’s breathing on the line, heavy and unsteady.
“Cassia.”
“Papa.”
Nothing. Just that breathing, that awful silence where words should be. I wait for him to say anything. To tell me I made a mistake, to demand I come home, to rage against the man who just took his daughter in a clinical ceremony with tobacco-stained witnesses.
He says nothing.
The silence stretches. My chest aches with it.
Fight for me. Just once. Just this once.
He doesn’t.
Dante appears above my shoulder. I didn’t hear him move.
“Give me the phone.”
I should argue. Should insist on finishing this conversation, on saying goodbye, on giving my parents whatever closure they need.
Instead I hand it over.
His fingers brush mine during the transfer. Electric. Brief. Gone.
“Umberto.” His voice is cold, controlled, every inch the Don. “Your debt is paid. Your daughter is my wife.”
I can’t hear my father’s response. Can only see Dante’s face, impassive, giving nothing away.
“We’ll discuss terms for future contact at a later date. Goodbye.”
He hangs up. Sets the phone down on the desk with a soft click.
Three sentences. That’s all my old life was worth. Three sentences and a dial tone and my father’s wordless surrender of the daughter who’d just saved him.
My body is hollow. My hands hang loose at my sides, fingers slack, and I can’t remember how to close them. My chest is still, my breathing mechanical.
Frost on glass, spreading.
“The staff will show you to our room,” Dante says. “Maria will bring your belongings when they arrive.”
Our room.
Our.
“Where are you going?”
He’s already moving toward the door. “I have business to attend to. I’ll be up later.”
And then he’s gone, and I’m standing alone in his father’s study with a ring on my finger and my mother’s sobs ringing in my ears.
The bedroom is larger than my old bedroom at home.
That’s the first thing I notice. The obscene amount of space, the massive four-poster bed, the windows overlooking gardens I can see only as darkness. Dark wood and deep colors, masculine and imposing and foreign.
His things are everywhere. A watch on the nightstand. Cufflinks in a small dish by the mirror. A half-empty glass of water from this morning that no one has cleared away yet. Dress shirts visible through the open closet door. A pair of shoes lined up by the wall.
I’m surrounded by evidence of him, and he’s nowhere to be found.
This is where he sleeps. Where he dreams. Where he has nightmares, if the sounds I used to hear through walls during those late-night audits were real.
Now it’s where I’ll sleep too.
A woman named Maria brought me here. Kind eyes, efficient movements, calling me signora like it was the most natural thing in the world. She showed me the bathroom, the closet where my clothes will be hung, the bell I can ring if I need anything.
I thanked her. She left.
Now I’m sitting on the edge of the bed in borrowed nightclothes, staring at the door, trying to remember how to breathe.
He’ll be here soon. We’ll share this bed. That’s how it works, apparently. Tradition. Expectation. A married couple sleeps together, and word travels fast in a household full of staff with nothing better to do than gossip.
This is fine. This is the arrangement. Don’t hope for more.
The mantra loops through my head like a prayer I don’t believe.
The books on his nightstand aren’t alphabetized. Five of them, stacked without order, spines facing different directions. A history of the Ottoman Empire. A thriller I recognize from airport bookstores. A slim volume of Italian poetry with a cracked spine.
It bothers me more than it should. I could fix it in thirty seconds. Organize by height, or author’s last name, or subject matter.
Stop it. You’re being ridiculous.
I hear the door before I see it open.
He enters with his tie already loosened. His eyes find me on the bed, and his jaw sets. A muscle shifts near his temple. Then it’s gone, smoothed over, unreadable.
“You should sleep.”
“So should you.”
He pauses. Holds my gaze one second too long. Two. The air between us thickens, and I’m the one who looks away first.
Then he disappears into the bathroom without another word.
I lie down. Pull the covers up. Face the wall, away from his side of the bed.
The sheets smell like him. Clean and expensive, cedar and smoke, and underneath it the warm salt of his skin that makes my blood rush faster than it should. The pillow holds the indent of his head from last night. From all the nights before.
I’m lying where he lies. Breathing what he breathes. Learning his scent like a language I never knew I wanted to speak.
I hear the water running. The sounds of him getting ready for bed, muffled through the door. A drawer opening. Closing. The soft thud of a glass set down on marble. My heart is hammering so loud I’m certain he’ll hear it.
This is fine. This is the arrangement.
The bathroom door opens.
I don’t turn around. Can’t. If I look at him right now, I don’t know what my face might reveal, and I can’t afford to give anything away.
The mattress dips as he gets in on his side.
Twelve inches. Maybe less. That’s all the space between us.
I can hear him. The slow, controlled rhythm of air filling his lungs. Too deliberate. No one sounds that composed unless they’re trying.
He’s awake. He knows I’m awake. We both know, and neither of us speaks.
The quiet between us roars.
His breathing. Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-five. My skin prickles with heat, every nerve ending tuned to the warmth radiating from his body, the slight movements when he shifts, the rustle of sheets.
Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine.
Is he sleeping?
His breathing is even, measured, but too precise. Too controlled. Like he’s performing unconsciousness for an audience of one.
Thirty-one. Thirty-two.
I’m hyper-aware of my own body now. The way I’m holding my limbs, stiff and unnatural. The rise and fall of my chest, loud in my own ears. The space between us, electric and unbearable.
Don’t hope. Don’t hope. Don’t hope.
The books are still in disarray on the nightstand. I can’t see them from here, but I know they are, and my brain won’t stop circling back to them. The thriller should be on the bottom because it’s the tallest. Then the history book. The poetry collection on top because it’s slim, easy to grab.
I reorganize them in my head three different ways before my hands start reaching for the nightstand.
You’re deflecting.
Of course I’m deflecting. The alternative is lying here, cataloging every shift in his breathing, sharing darkness with a man who owns me on paper but won’t look at me when we’re alone.
Hours pass. Or minutes. Time has gone strange and elastic.
His rhythm never changes. That precise, controlled cadence. That careful distance between us.
My eyelids grow heavy. The exhaustion is real, bone-deep, the whole day catching up at once. But every time I start to drift, I become aware of him again, that magnetic pull that won’t let me forget he’s there.
This is my life now. Lying awake beside him. Tracking each inhale. Pretending I don’t notice.
Somewhere in the distance, a clock strikes two.
Then three.
I’m on that edge between consciousness and oblivion when I hear him move.
The mattress shifts. Careful, quiet, trying not to disturb.
I keep my breathing even. My eyes closed. Play dead, the way I used to when my sister would sneak out and I didn’t want to know where she was going.
His footsteps cross the room. Barefoot on hardwood.
The door opens. Closes.
Silence.
I lie still, listening to the nothing he’s left behind. Tracking his footsteps in my mind as they move down the hall. The creak of another door. The study, maybe. Or somewhere else in this house I don’t know yet.
He left.
Of course he left.
Don’t hope, I told myself. This is the arrangement.
But beneath my ribs, in that hollow space I’ve carried since I was old enough to understand what it meant to be second, a want had taken root. Small, stupid, stubborn. The kind that imagines tonight might be different, that sharing a bed might mean he’d stay.
He didn’t.
I turn onto my back. Stare at the ceiling, all shadow and nothing.
It’s 3:00 a.m., and my husband is somewhere else, doing anything but being here. With me.
The girl no one stays for.
The practical daughter.
The useful one.
I lie there until the gray light of dawn starts creeping through the curtains, and I still don’t sleep. But I don’t cry either.
I’m done crying for people who walk away.