Chapter 3
Valentina
I might have let out a nervous, panicked laugh if it weren’t for the serious look on my father’s face. Instead, I hissed, “Marriage? Papa, what are you talking about?”
“Your engagement,” he said, looking out at the courtyard below. “Why do you think I invited you here?”
“I thought you invited me to make me your second,” I said, too shocked to hide my expectations.
Perhaps it was entitled of me to have believed that was why I’d been summoned to the opera, but what else was I supposed to think?
Now my father was talking about an engagement as if I should have known. “What engagement?”
“You’re going to be married,” he said. As if that was enough of an explanation.
“Am I? How strange. This is the first I’m hearing of it,” I said sardonically, my grip on the balcony railing tightening.
Anxiety twisted my stomach. This was the last thing I expected and I felt unmoored.
While I could handle making threats, intimidating enemies, or orchestrating outright violence when necessary, I was not prepared to deal with what my father was currently throwing at me.
Bending the criminal underworld to my will was much easier than living the domestic nightmare my father seemed to have set up.
“Please don’t be difficult, Valentina,” my father said gently. “Everything’s been arranged.”
This time, I really did laugh. A bitter, frustrated sound. “I seem to have forgotten about this arrangement. Refresh my memory.”
Exhaling loudly, my father said, “I have arranged for you to be married. And soon.”
“Why on earth?” I demanded, so angry that I was forgetting myself.
While I was brave enough to speak my mind to my father, I was never disrespectful.
Nor was I ever carried away by anger. But already I could feel my blood boiling.
My father was being deadly serious and there was no way to pretend otherwise.
This insane situation was undeniably real.
“It is for the good of the family,” my father answered.
“Selling me off is for the good of our family?” I demanded.
“An alliance like this will help all of us,” he said. “We need this. This is a positive for all of us, you especially.”
“I fail to see how bartering me like we’re in the nineteenth century helps me or anyone else in our family,” I said curtly. “We’re not in some Italian village one hundred and fifty years ago. This is the modern world.”
“It is the modern world, but we are part of an old tradition,” my father reminded me.
I bristled at that. It was that very tradition I had been fighting against, and now it felt like it was ensnaring me. “If tradition matters, then we wouldn’t be trying to make this sort of alliance. I would have at least been included.”
“I’m including you now,” he said to me calmly.
“I want to marry a man of my choosing,” I responded, prepared to hold the line and defend my position. I refused to be coerced into such a ridiculous arrangement.
“It’s not that simple,” my father said.
“It is that simple, Papa,” I insisted, gathering strength from the cool night breeze that was picking up. “Nobody gets married for convenience anymore.”
My father shook his head. “That’s where you are wrong. Families in our line of work make marriage deals more often than you realize. Even families who make their money legitimately negotiate these types of proposals.”
“How long have you been planning this without my knowledge?” I demanded.
He hesitated. At least he had the decency to look sheepish about what he was putting me through. “A few months,” he finally responded.
“So that means you haven’t been planning to marry me off for years and years,” I said flatly. “You only decided this recently. Or maybe you’ve always planned on marrying me off and I just never realized.”
My father shook his head. “No, I hadn’t always planned this. For years I wanted you to choose for yourself.”
“What’s changed?” I asked, giving him a long stare so that I could judge if he was telling me the whole truth.
“Our position. Circumstances,” he said evasively.
“You’ve kept the truth from me long enough, Papa,” I said. “I think I have the right to know everything.”
My father sighed heavily. “Very well. With Tony gone, we’re not as powerful as we once were.”
“Uncle Tony did help to keep us strong,” I conceded.
Even though Uncle Tony wasn’t a blood relative, he might as well have been.
He and my father had secured the North East, entrenching our operations in territories we had never dreamed of before my father’s generation.
But Papa and Uncle Tony had made it happen.
Their bond was so strong that they might as well have been blood brothers.
To me, Tony had been like another father.
The one I could talk to without having to watch my words or prove anything to.
He’d believed in me and even convinced my father that I was worth listening to.
Uncle Tony had vouched for me when I was younger, despite the fact that I wasn’t male.
He’d been one of the reasons that my father had taken me seriously when I had first indicated that I wanted to be part of the family business.
“But even though Uncle Tony’s gone,” I continued, “I will make us stronger now. You know that I’m more than capable. If you’re trying to make an alliance, I can do that. I’ve secured alliances before. Marriage isn’t a requirement to win people over.”
“It is in this case,” my father said. “You need security Lena.”
“I can protect myself—”
“No,” Papa said firmly, cutting me off. “First, Tony was killed. Then a year later there was the car bombing that almost took my life. Our enemies are getting bolder.”
I lifted my chin defiantly. “I will be twice as bold.”
Again, he shook his head. “I know how strong and brave you are, but our enemies aren’t going to see that. They can’t see what I see because...”
My defiance flared to preemptive defensiveness. I could guess what was behind that apologetic tone. A tone so apologetic that it might as well have been patronizing. “Because what?”
“Because there is a risk of you suddenly ending up utterly alone. With no man by your side,” my father replied slowly. “What if I had been killed in that bombing? You would have had no father to protect you. No father, no brother, no husband, no son.”
“You think they’ll see me as a weak woman if I’m promoted,” I accused.
Papa’s shoulders dropped. “Please understand, I don’t see you that way Valentina.”
“You used to.”
“Yes, when you were a child,” he explained. “But I’ve seen the woman you have grown up to be. You are clever, strong. You never back down. You’re the reason we’ve been able to remain standing since Tony’s murder.”
“So name me your second,” I said.
“I would be putting the biggest target on your back if I did that,” he said.
“I’m a Romano. There’s already a target on my back,” I reminded him.
“Believe me, it gets worse the higher you climb. You think they place bombs in cars for just anyone?” Papa said. “A woman as my second, my own daughter...what they would do to you is unimaginable, Lena. If they killed me, what would it matter in the long run? But you? My only child?”
When his voice cracked on that last question, my father turned his face away from me.
“Papa.” My heart ached all over again. It was normal for a parent to worry about their child. For a mafia don, the worry was tenfold because their loved ones were automatic targets. That risk would only increase if I was named second-in-command. “The man you have chosen, does he know what we do?”
The thought of having to live a double life filled me with dread.
While it hadn’t been the case for my parents, there were some in the mafia who kept the truth from their spouses and their adult children.
They lied and pretended to merely be wealthy businessmen in a misguided attempt to shield them.
My father had kept me in the dark until I was a teenager, but I hadn’t been surprised when he told me.
Papa had never kept regular business hours and he’d been so secretive when I was a child.
But, I was clever, so over the years, I had guessed that he must have been keeping something from me.
Just like he had been hiding the truth about the engagement.
The difference now, however, was that while I had figured out that something was on the verge of changing, I was genuinely surprised by what my father was revealing to me.
Marriage was the last thing on my mind when I had started to guess that something was going on behind the scenes.
And now, not only was I being pushed into marriage, there was a good chance that my father was also asking me to lie to my future husband.
That was not something I could abide. Even if I was marrying a man of my own choosing, I refused to maintain a lie for years on end.
Anyone who was going to be in my life forever had the right to know the sort of danger they were getting into.
Maybe that was why I so often hesitated to allow my relationships to get serious.
While some of my would-be suitors knew that I was a mafia don’s daughter, many had no idea.
It was always easier to break up with them before things got too serious.
Seeing my father’s reluctance to answer, I said, “If I’m expected to maintain a lie, then I cannot marry him.”
My father let out a shuddering sigh. “He’s well aware of what we do.”
“That means he’s one of us. Or at least, that means he has strong ties to the criminal underworld,” I observed with a frown.
It occurred to me that I still had no idea who the groom was.
It couldn’t be hard to figure out, my father only had a small list of men who worked for him that weren’t related to us.