Chapter 5
EMMA
I’m going to die of boredom before my father can rescue me.
I’ve already memorized every inch of this prison masquerading as a luxury bedroom.
I know there are exactly forty-seven floorboards between the bed and the door.
I know the third window from the left has a small crack in the bottom corner of the glass.
I know that if I stand in the exact center of the room and spin in a circle with my eyes closed, I’ll get dizzy after exactly twelve rotations.
I know all of this because I have absolutely nothing else to do.
I’ve made peace with the fact that I can’t escape from this room.
Yet.
I’ve tested every possible weakness and come up empty, and continuing to throw myself at the problem is just wasting energy I might need later.
So for now, I wait. I plan.
I try not to think about my mother and whether she’s okay, whether my father is looking for me, or if Tony is relieved or embarrassed that his bride got stolen at the altar.
Mostly I try not to think about the fact that I’m a prisoner of a man who hates my family enough to start a war.
“This is fine,” I say aloud to the empty room. “Everything is totally fine. I’m just locked in a cage by a psychopath with a revenge fetish. Perfectly normal Tuesday.”
It’s actually Thursday.
I think.
The days are starting to blur together.
Giving in, I wander over to the bookshelf that I noticed when Leo so rudely dumped me in here.
I’d purposely avoided it, not wanting to distract myself with anything provided by Leo.
But the desperation clawing at my insides, tearing apart my mind, finally has me on my knees.
I’m giving in—just a little.
And I hate myself for it.
I scan the titles and immediately wrinkle my nose.
“Seriously?” I pull out a book and read the spine. “Dante’s Inferno. How appropriately on the nose.” I shove it back and grab another, grimacing. “Machiavelli. Naturally. Because what kidnapped woman doesn’t want to read The Prince in her spare time?”
I keep going, getting progressively more annoyed with each title.
Calvino. Eco. Moravia.
All Italian authors, of course, because God forbid Leo Santoro provide me with anything that isn’t a love letter to his heritage.
There are a few contemporary Italian novels I don’t recognize, some poetry by Ungaretti that I vaguely remember from a college literature course, and—
“Philosophy texts?” I pull out a volume of Nietzsche and stare at it like it personally offended me. “He thinks I want to read Nietzsche? Does he think I’m going to have some kind of philosophical awakening about the nature of good and evil while I’m locked in this room?”
I shove it back on the shelf with more force than necessary.
“Clearly you weren’t watching closely enough, Leo,” I mutter, moving down the shelf.
“If you had been, you’d know I hate pretentious Italian literature.
You’d know I read trashy romance novels and true crime and occasionally some literary fiction if it doesn’t take itself too seriously.
You’d know I think Hemingway is overrated garbage and that I threw A Farewell to Arms across my dorm room after forcing myself to finish it. ”
There are a few English classics mixed in—some Austen, some Bronte, a copy of Wuthering Heights that actually looks promising—but mostly it’s Italian authors and philosophy texts, like Leo decided what an educated young woman should read rather than what an actual young woman would want to read.
“Next time you kidnap someone,” I tell the empty room, turning away from the bookshelf in disgust, “maybe do better research on their reading preferences. Just a thought.”
The sketchpad on the desk by the window catches my eye.
My chest tightens.
He knows I draw.
I don’t want to think how closely he must have been watching me to know that.
Drawing is private.
It’s mine.
It’s the one thing I do that has nothing to do with being Connor Brennan’s daughter or the perfect mob princess or any of the roles I’m expected to play.
When I’m drawing, I’m just Emma, and the fact that Leo Santoro knows about it feels like a violation.
But the sketchpad is here.
The pencils are good quality.
I can tell from across the room that they’re not cheap drugstore pencils but actual artist pencils, the kind that cost money and produce the kind of lines I like.
And the temptation to give in just a little more and lose myself to something I can create with my hands is too much to ignore.
“Fine,” I say aloud, walking over to the desk. “But this doesn’t mean I’m grateful or anything. This just means I’m bored and you happen to have provided the materials I need to not continue to lose my mind.”
The retort doesn’t make me feel any better.
I sit down, open the sketchpad to a fresh page, and pick up a pencil.
The weight of it feels good in my hand, familiar and grounding.
I close my eyes for a moment and let myself just breathe, let the panic and fear and rage fade into the background.
Then I start to draw.
My mother’s face takes shape first, flowing from my pencil like muscle memory.
I draw her the way she looked the morning of my wedding—before everything went to hell—when she was helping me into that dress and her hands were shaking slightly because she was trying not to cry.
I capture the soft waves of her auburn-and-silver hair, the pearls at her throat, the champagne silk of her dress.
But mostly I focus on her face.
Teresa Brennan is beautiful, even at fifty-two.
Age has refined her features rather than diminished them, given her a kind of elegant grace that younger women can’t quite achieve. But it’s her eyes I work hardest on.
The eyes I inherited.
The way they hold so much that she never says, so much carefully controlled emotion hidden beneath that perfect mob wife facade.
My mother has perfected the brittle smile, the one she wears at family dinners and charity galas and anywhere she needs to pretend that everything is fine.
The smile that says “I’m the wife of Connor Brennan and I’m perfectly content with my life” while her eyes say something else entirely.
I love my mother. I’ve always loved her, even when I didn’t understand her, or couldn’t figure out why she stayed with my father through everything.
She’s been my refuge since I was a child, the one person in our family who sees me as Emma first and a pawn second.
She’s the one who taught me to draw and would sit with me in the garden and let me sketch the flowers while she read her romance novels that she thought I didn’t know about.
“You have your own life to live, sweetheart,” she told me once when I was sixteen and complaining about some family obligation. “Don’t let them take that away from you. Don’t let them make you smaller than you are.”
But then she turned around and supported my father when he arranged my marriage to Tony Lombardo, smiled that brittle smile and told me it was a good match, that Tony seemed nice and I’d learn to be happy.
Like she’d learned to be happy.
Or pretend to be happy. I’m still not sure which.
I shade in the shadows around her eyes, the tiny lines that appear when her smile doesn’t quite reach them, and I feel my throat getting tight.
Is she okay?
Does she know I’m alive?
My father would have told her, wouldn’t he?
Unless he decided it would be better for her not to know, to protect her from the worry.
No.
He would have told her.
Even Connor Brennan isn’t cruel enough to let his wife think their daughter is dead.
I hope.
I finish the sketch and stare at it for a long moment, my mother’s face looking back at me from the page.
Then I flip to a new sheet and start on my father.
Dad is harder to capture.
He’s sharp angles and hard lines, steel-gray hair and blue-gray eyes that miss nothing.
I draw him the way he looked walking me down the aisle—imposing in his tuxedo, his jaw set in that way that means he’s satisfied with how things are going.
In control.
Powerful.
The man who arranged my marriage to seal a business deal.
The man who, according to Leo, loves me more than anything else in the world.
I pause mid-stroke, the pencil hovering over the paper.
Does he?
Does my father actually love me more than anything else, or is that just what Leo wants to believe to justify this whole revenge plot?
I know my father loves me, I’ve never doubted that.
He’s always been protective and made sure I had everything I needed.
He’s always called me “Emma girl” in that rough, affectionate voice that he doesn’t use with anyone else.
When I was little, he’d carry me on his shoulders and buy me ice cream and tell me I could be anything I wanted to be.
But what he loves most in the world?
More than his power, his empire, his position as head of the Brennan clan?
Nah. If that were true, would he have sold me to the Lombardos like a prize mare?
I don’t want to think about that too closely.
I don’t want to think about what it means that my father—who supposedly values me above all else—was perfectly willing to marry me off to a man I barely knew for shipping routes and political alliances.
I cannot consider the possibility that Leo might be wrong and I’m not the leverage he thinks I am.
Because if I’m not, if my father doesn’t love me the way Leo believes he does, then what was the point of all this? What am I even worth as a hostage?
“Stop it,” I tell myself firmly, closing my eyes and taking a deep breath. “Dad loves you. He’s coming for you. This is just Connor Brennan being strategic, and you’ve always known that’s how he operates.”
But the doubt lingers as I finish the sketch.
My father’s hard face stares out from the page with those shrewd eyes that have probably ordered more deaths than I can count.
I flip to a new page and, almost without meaning to, I start drawing Leo.
I’m only drawing him because his face is burned into my memory after several days of wanting to kill him.
Drawing helps me process things, and I need to process the fact that I’m being held captive by a man who looks like he could snap me in half but also somehow carries me upstairs like I weigh nothing and checks to make sure I’m eating.