Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
Gemma
"Say that again," I tell Luca.
"In three days, we're getting married." He doesn't blink. His hands are still flat on the white tablecloth, and he says it the same way he said we were moving apartments. Like a schedule. Like weather.
What?
"Okay," I say. "No. I want to leave now."
"Gemma."
"I want to leave." I push my chair back an inch. The legs catch on the carpet and don't move the way I want them to, which is a stupid detail to notice, but I notice it. "You can eat. I'll wait by the elevator."
He closes his eyes slowly. Then he opens them and starts talking, low, so only I can hear.
"Sit. Please. There are two families looking for you. Not one. Two. The Beka, the Albanians your husband stole from. And the Orsini, out of Milwaukee. The men at my apartment yesterday were Orsini soldiers. That's why we're at the goddamn compound."
I stay where I am, half out of the chair, and my stomach goes down and keeps going, past the ninety-five floors, all the way to the street.
"I've never heard that name," I say. "Orsini. I don't know it."
"I know you don't. Doesn't matter. They know yours."
"Why?" My voice comes out small and I hate that. "Dominik owed the Albanians. You said the Albanians. When did there get to be two?"
"Your husband did business with more people than you knew about.
He fucked over more people than you knew about.
" Luca's jaw works. "The Orsini want you for leverage.
The Beka want money. Either way they come through you to get it, and either way you and Nina are the softest point of entry in the whole shitty equation. "
"So we hide. That's what we've been doing. Hiding, moving, cutting my hair—"
"Hiding buys weeks. Marriage buys years.
" He leans forward, and the candle on the table lights the underside of his face, the black line of ink down his throat.
"This probably doesn't make sense to you.
In my world, people get married to seal peace.
To end wars. To make it so nobody can touch you without touching the whole fucking family behind you.
If you're my wife, you're Sartori. You're not a waitress with a dead man's debt anymore.
You're protected. Nina's protected. Anyone who comes for you starts a war they can't afford. "
I hold my hand up, Palm out.
"I'm not part of your world," I say.
"No. You're not. You never were. But Dominik was.
You didn't choose this, Gemma, he chose it for you the day he put a ring on your finger and didn't tell you what the hell he did for a living.
You've been part of it for years. You just didn't get the memo until people started following you home from work. "
I sit back down. Not because he told me to. Because my legs decide it for me.
"Nobody asked me," I say. "Nobody asked me about any of it. Dominik didn't ask. These families didn't ask. Now you're not asking either. You're telling me over dinner like it's already done."
"Because it is already done. The only choice left is whether you walk into it knowing what it is or whether it happens to you like everything else has."
I press my thumbnail into the pad of my finger under the table, hard, to have one thing I control. There's a question underneath all the other questions, and it's been rising the whole time he talked, and now it's the only one left.
"Why you," I say. "You barely know me. You've spent two weeks fixing a problem I dropped in your lap, and now you're going to marry it? Sign your name to it? Why the hell would you agree to that?"
Luca
I've told the truth all night. Every word. The Beka want money. The Orsini want her. Both of those are facts. The lie isn't in what I say. It's in what I leave out, and the space where it lives is bigger than this room.
"The Beka are the easy part," I say. "It's money. The Sartoris will settle whatever the hell your husband owed. It gets paid, it's done, they stop looking. That debt dies on paper next week."
"You can just do that? Pay off Albanians like a phone bill."
"It costs more than a phone bill. But yes."
"And the Orsini." She says the name slowly, testing it. "The ones who shot at us this morning. They don't want money."
Here is where I have to be careful. I take a drink of wine.
"The Sartoris want an alliance with them.
Territory, shipping lanes, shit that's been argued over for years.
Bruno's been working on it a long time." I watch her face while I build it.
"Right now, you're a problem for that alliance.
A loose woman with a dead husband's mess attached to her, sitting in Sartori hands.
Orsini doesn't like loose things near his business. "
"So I'm an obstacle. To a deal between two crime families I'd never heard of until today."
"You were. If we marry, you're not loose anymore. You're Sartori. Family. The alliance goes through, and the Orsini leave you alone, because touching a Sartori wife starts a war nobody wants."
The waiter drifts close. I look at him and he finds another table to care about.
"How long," she says.
"A year, minimum. It has to hold. Orsini will want proof it's real, not paper.
That means we're seen together. Dinners.
Family events. Church, weddings, whatever the calendar demands.
A couple, in public, where his people can watch.
" I clear my throat, and I hear myself do it, which means she heard it too. "You'll wear a ring. So will I."
Proof. The word Bruno used meant more than dinners. I don't put that on the table.
"And to answer your question," I say.
She goes still. The city glitters behind her and she doesn't see any of it.
"Because if I don't marry you, someone else does.
" My voice comes out lower than I planned.
"Bruno needs a Sartori name on you either way.
If it's not mine, he picks a soldier. Some man you've never met signs a paper and moves into your life, and you and Nina live in his house on his terms, and I have no goddamn say in how he treats either of you.
Or you refuse, you run, and the Orsini find you inside a month. That's not a threat. It's a fact."
"So my options are you, a stranger, or dead."
"Yes."
She laughs once, short, no air in it, and covers her mouth with her hand like the sound embarrassed her.
"Most proposals have flowers," she says from behind her fingers.
"Most proposals are shit anyway."
Her hand comes down. Her eyes are wet and she is furious about it, blinking hard, jaw set, refusing to let a single one fall in front of me. She picks up the fork again and this time she cuts into the fish, one small precise bite, chewing like it's a job she was assigned.
"Nina," she says when she's swallowed. "What does Nina become in this?"
"Protected. Mine to protect, legally and every other way. Nobody touches her. Ever."
She nods slowly, and I understand that I've just said the only true thing that mattered to her all night, and it was the one sentence I didn't rehearse.
"Okay," she says. "Tell me what happens in three days."
Gemma
The phone is still warm against my ear when Nina finishes telling me about the pajama party.
"Lily has a sleeping bag with unicorns on it, and Miss Kristen says I can borrow the purple one, and we're gonna watch a movie with a dragon in it," she says, all in one breath, and I can hear Lily shrieking about popcorn somewhere behind her.
"That sounds perfect, baby. You listen to Miss Kristen, okay?"
"Okay. Night, Mommy."
"Night, sweetheart. I love you."
She's gone before the last word lands. Kristen comes on for two seconds to say they're fine, they're great, don't hurry back, and then the line is dead. I'm holding a phone that isn't mine in a car that isn't mine next to a man I'm marrying in three days.
I set the phone in my lap and look out the window.
The scream starts somewhere under my ribs. I know it when it shows up because it's an old feeling, older than Dominik, older than most things.
When I was seven my mother found me under the porch after a birthday party where I'd cried in the bathroom because there were too many kids and too much noise.
She didn't tell me to calm down. She took my hand, walked me into the backyard past Oscar's run, and said, scream it out, Gemma. Loud as you can. Nobody's grading you. So I did, and she did it with me, both of us howling at the fence until Oscar joined in, and after that I could breathe again.
I haven't done it since I was maybe twelve. The feeling never stopped showing up, though. It's here now, sitting in my throat like I swallowed wrong, and my hands are folded too neatly in my lap. I can't stop thinking about a courthouse or a church or wherever people like him get married.
"You're quiet," Luca says. He doesn't look over. "If there's anything you need before we're back, say it now. Anything."
He means food. Or a toothbrush, or clothes, or whatever normal gap he thinks he can fill by stopping at a store.
"It's fine," I say.
"Don't give me fine. I asked what you need."
I watch a plane slide down toward Midway with its lights blinking and the honest thing comes out of me before I decide to let it.
"I'd love to go up on a roof and scream my lungs out."
It sounds insane out loud. I hear it land in the car and I already want it back. A normal woman would ask for a drink, or a night to think, or a lawyer.
Luca doesn't answer. He checks the mirror, signals, and cuts across two lanes toward the exit we just passed the ramp for.
The car swings hard enough that I grab the door handle, and then we're off the highway.
He's turning us around at the light, pointing the hood back at the skyline we spent twenty minutes leaving.
"What are you doing?" I ask.
"Getting you a goddamn roof."
I stare at him. His face gives me nothing, jaw set, eyes on the road, the streetlights sliding over his tattoos where they climb out of his collar.
"Luca. I wasn't— you don't have to. It was a stupid thing to say."
"It wasn't stupid." He takes the ramp back toward the city and the engine picks up under us. "You said what you need. First fucking time since I met you."