Chapter 1 #2
I look at my father. The flat brown eyes, the tailored suit, the folded glasses on the desk.
The man who raised me, who trained me, who put karambits in my hands when I was thirteen and taught me to cut a man's throat before I learned to drive.
The man who calls me his piccola arma, and has never once in my life treated me as anything other than an instrument of his will.
He will do it. He will send Giada somewhere I can't follow, and he'll do it with the same detached efficiency he brings to everything, and he won't lose a minute of sleep because sleep is for men with consciences and my father burned through his decades ago.
"Two weeks," I say.
"Two weeks."
"Giada comes with me."
"That's not—"
"Giada comes with me or the bride doesn't show up.
Send me to the Bonaccorso compound, fine.
Marry me to Aurelio's bastard, fine. But Giada is beside me when I walk through those gates or I walk through them with Vita and Morte and I cut my way back out and you can explain to the Silent why their treaty fell apart because you were too fucking stupid to let me bring my friend. "
He looks like I slapped him, but he takes the insult because there’s nothing else he can do about it. He needs me to marry into this arrangement, or everything he’s built is going to be fucked. The answer is obvious. This marriage is worth more than winning this argument.
Not to mention, his daughter is standing in front of him with painfully empty hands and a whole ass threat and he knows, the way he's always known, that the one thing I will never do is bluff.
"Fine. Giada goes with you."
"Good."
"Antonia."
"What."
"This is not a punishment. This is the world we live in.
The Bonaccorsos need stability. The Castillos need protection.
The Silent needs both families under one roof, and the marriage is the mechanism that achieves it.
You are not being traded. You are being trusted with the most important assignment I've ever given anyone. "
"Funny how the most important assignment always involves me losing something."
I turn and walk out before he can answer because if I stay in that room for one more second I'm going to go upstairs and get Vita and Morte and come back and do something that can't be undone.
And I'm not ready for that.
Yet.
Giada's apartment is on the third floor of the east wing, the section of the estate reserved for senior staff and their families. Her father was one of my father’s best soldiers before a bullet took his left knee and turned him into a desk man.
Her mother died when she was nine. She grew up in the corridors of this estate the same way I did, running through hallways full of men with guns, learning to shoot before she learned long division, and developing a personality so loud and reckless that half the soldiers in the building are in love with her and the other half are terrified of her.
She's my best friend. My only friend. The one person in twenty-five years of living inside the Castillo machine who has never looked at me and seen me as anyone other than who I am.
I walk in without waiting because we stopped knocking years ago. Her place is a disaster. Clothes on every surface, takeout containers on the kitchen counter, a bra hanging from the lamp near the door. Giada lives the way she fights, explosively and without cleanup.
She's on the couch with her legs over the armrest and her phone in her hand and a glass of red wine balanced on her stomach, which is a feat of core strength and disregard for stains that I've always admired.
"You look pissed," she says without looking up.
"I'm getting married."
She drops the phone. The wine wobbles but doesn't spill because God protects chaotic women and their upholstery.
"Excuse me?"
"Marco just told me. Two weeks. Bonaccorso compound. A man named Matteo Billone… Aurelio's son."
Giada sits up. The wine finally tips, splashing across her shirt before she quickly rights it, and she doesn't notice or doesn't care, which with her could be either.
Her face goes through four expressions in seconds, surprise, fury, disbelief, and then the one I know best, the grin that means someone is about to have a very bad day.
"Absolutely not."
"That's what I said."
"But?"
"But he threatened you."
The grin dies. Giada is loud and reckless and fearless about most things, but she's not stupid.
She knows what he is capable of. She's seen what happens to people who get between him and his objectives.
She's seen the reassignments, the disappearances, the soldiers who asked too many questions and got transferred to operations in countries where the life expectancy of a Castillo soldier is measured in months.
She knows because she’s experienced it.
"That piece of shit," she says quietly. "He used me."
"He's been using you since I was sixteen. You're the only leverage he has and he knows it and I hate him for it and I can't do anything about it because the alternative is watching you disappear to some shithole on the other side of the world."
"Toni—"
"I told him yes." The words come out flat and dead. "I told him yes because the other option was losing you, and I've lost enough people in this family to know that the ones you choose are worth more than the ones you're born to."
She is quiet. She sets the wine glass on the floor, which is the most responsible thing she's done with a glass of wine in years.
She stands and crosses the room and wraps her arms around me and holds on, and I let her because Giada is the one person I don't perform for.
With everyone else in this building I am the Castillo heir who carries Vita and Morte and doesn't flinch.
With Giada I'm Toni. Just Toni. The girl who used to sneak into her room at fourteen and watch terrible movies and eat candy until our teeth hurt.
"I'm coming with you," she says into my shoulder.
"I already told him. You come or I don't."
"And he agreed?"
"He didn't have a choice. The marriage is more important than controlling every detail, and I'm the one detail he's never been able to control."
She pulls back and looks at me. Her eyes are dark and wet and angry, which is the Giada version of crying.
"Tell me about him."