Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Gemma
"And your eyes," Cesare says, setting down his fork. "Almost gray. Your mother's, or your father's?"
The question sits on the table with the veal and the wine nobody has finished.
"My mother's are blue," I say. "My dad's are brown. So I guess mine came from somewhere in the middle."
"From somewhere in the middle," Cesare repeats. He smiles like I've said a clever thing, and I haven't. I've said a true thing in the flattest voice I own.
Luca's hand hasn't left my back since we sat down. Not resting — placed. Four fingers spread between my shoulder blades, warm through the fabric of my dress.
The dining room is long and dark, wood everywhere, a fireplace nobody lit. Two doors, one behind Cesare, one behind me. Three guards standing along the wall with their hands folded in front of them.
Twelve chairs. Seven of us. Cesare at the head, Vico and Nero flanking him, then Bruno, Antonella, Luca, me.
Earlier, when we walked in, Cesare kissed Antonella's hand and mine and said, "Forgive the house.
My wife keeps it too warm, and tonight she's with our daughters.
" Then, to me, like it mattered that I know: "I have five sons.
Only two of them honor me with their presence tonight.
" He'd looked at Nero and Vico when he said honor, and neither of them looked back.
So it's me, Antonella and a table of men.
"Tell me about Wisconsin," Cesare says now. "You grew up there. A farm?"
"A regular house. My dad sold insurance. We had a dog. Ordinary things."
"A dog." He nods like this is important information. His skin has a yellow tint, and his hands shake when they're not holding anything, so he keeps them on his glass. "A happy childhood, then."
"A normal one."
"And you were born there? In Wisconsin?"
"Madison," I say.
"Were you an easy birth? Early, late?" Cesare tilts his head. "You'll forgive an old man. I ask because I had a daughter come early. Six weeks. The doctors said prepare yourself, and instead she screamed louder than all the boys."
"I don't know," I say. "My mom never talked about it much."
"No stories? Mothers love those stories."
"Mine loved other stories."
Across the table, Antonella lifts her wine and drinks. Her eyes come to me over the rim. A small look. It says I see this too. Bruno cuts his veal and says nothing, and his silence takes up more room than Cesare's voice.
Luca's fingers press into my back, one degree harder.
"She's answered enough questions to fill a census," he says. His tone stays even, almost polite. "Ask me one."
Cesare laughs, a wet sound that turns into a cough he covers with a napkin. Nero watches his father cough and doesn't move. Vico watches me.
"You protect her," Cesare says, when he has his breath.
"Good. But I mean no harm, Signora Farro.
I'm a curious man, and I have little time left to be curious in.
And—" he spreads his shaking hands, "—I saw no family of yours at the wedding.
No mother with blue eyes. No father who sells insurance.
A bride with no people behind her. It makes a man wonder. "
I put my fork down. Under the table my knee touches Luca's, and I don't know if I did that or he did.
"My parents had a trip booked," I say. "Six weeks in Europe.
They'd planned it for two years, paid for everything up front.
Luca and I didn't plan the wedding far ahead — when we decided, we decided fast." I let a small breath out through my nose, the way a woman does when she's mildly embarrassed by her own romance.
"We weren't going to make them cancel. So we agreed we'd hold a ceremony for our closest family on our first anniversary.
Just them, my brother, a few people. Something small. "
Eighteen months of lying to my mother on the phone taught me how to do this. You keep the details boring. You give one number, one timeline, and you stop.
Cesare doesn't answer right away.
"A ceremony on the first anniversary," he says. "That's a beautiful thought."
"Interesting," Vico says.
Just the one word. He leans back in his chair with his wine and lets it hang there, waiting for me to explain, to add, to fill the quiet the way nervous people do.
I look at him, and then I look back at my plate and pick up my fork.
The silence stretches until Bruno breaks it with a question about football and they start talking about players and cups.
But Cesare isn't listening to Bruno. I can feel it without raising my head. He's still looking at me, and when I finally glance up, he lifts his glass an inch off the table — to me, only to me — and there's water standing in his eyes.
I don't know what I did to put it there.
Luca
Vico steps out of a side door before I reach the entrance hall, and his hand lands flat on my chest.
I stop. Gemma is thirty feet ahead with Bruno and Antonella, collecting her coat from a house guard. Two of Cesare's men hold the far end of the corridor.
"A word," Vico says.
"Then say the fucking word." I don't move his hand. Moving it starts a fight, and a fight in this house ends the alliance and possibly me. "You've got until my wife notices I'm not behind her."
He drops the hand himself. His jaw works before he speaks.
"The old man is getting attached," Vico says, low. "You saw it. He barely ate. He watched her the entire dinner like she'd vanish if he blinked."
"That's his problem. Not fucking mine."
"It becomes yours." He steps closer. "If you're playing games with our blood — if this marriage is a Sartori trick to put a hand around a dying man's heart — I will find out. And I'll take it out of you a piece at a time."
I keep my weight off the bad leg and my eyes on his hands. His right one stays loose at his side. He came to talk, not to swing. That's the only reason I'm still listening.
"She looks like her mother, you know," he says. "The resemblance is remarkable. Papà kept a photograph. One photograph, thirty years. Tonight he saw the photograph pick up a fork and answer questions in his dining room."
Somewhere behind Vico's voice I hear Gemma laugh at whatever Antonella said by the door, quick and nervous, cut short the moment she remembers where she is.
"Here's what happens if you people keep pushing," I say.
"You crowd her at coffee shops. You interrogate her over dinner.
You put a hand on my chest in a hallway.
Do it once more and I take my wife and go.
None of you ever sees her face again. There are places on this earth I can put her where your whole fucking family could search for a hundred years and die of old age looking. "
Vico's mouth goes a thin line. The corridor feels smaller.
"You do that," he says, leaning in, "and every Sartori in Chicago ends up dead. Your don. His wife. All of them. You will not take her from him in his last months and walk away breathing."
I hear the truth in it. Orsini soldiers already shot through my apartment door once. This is not a man bluffing over wine.
"Answer me one thing," I say. "Have you ever been in love?"
He blinks. Whatever he expected from me, it wasn't that.
"That's none of your fucking business."
"Then you don't know shit." My voice comes out level, which surprises me, because my pulse isn't. "If you had been, you'd know there's only one person who matters in a man's life, and it's the woman he loves.
I'd let this entire continent burn to ash before I let anyone put a hand on her.
So push me one more inch, Vico, and you'll regret it.
I promise you I won't give a single fuck what it costs me. "
The word burn comes out of my mouth and a piece of my heart breaks once again.
Vico closes the last distance and puts his forehead against mine. His breath is hot and sour. Neither of us blinks.
"The next time you threaten to take our sister from us," he says, quiet now, which is worse than the shouting, "you'll end up dead. Be grateful my father is dying and it's given him a soft heart. It's the only reason yours is still beating."
He steps back, straightens his jacket, and walks toward the two men at the end of the corridor without looking at me again.
I turn the other way and head for the doors.
The cars idle in the drive. Gemma sits in the back of ours with her coat still buttoned to the throat, and when she sees me through the glass, her shoulders come down two inches.
I wouldn't risk them. Not Bruno, not Antonella, not anyone. If it came to running, I'd find another way, a quieter way, and no Sartori would pay for it. Vico can believe whatever keeps him warm.
But the rest of it was true. Every word. I stood in that corridor and heard myself say it out loud to an Orsini before I'd said it anywhere else, even in my own head.
She waits for me in the car, watching me cross the gravel with her mother's face.
The worst part is that I might be in love with her.
Gemma
The door isn't even closed yet when I push him.
Luca lets me. He takes one step back into the bedroom, then another, and his calves hit the mattress. He looks at me the whole time with those eyes, and he doesn't ask me what I'm doing. He just reaches back without breaking eye contact, and waits.
The dinner is still sitting in my chest. Three hours of Cesare Orsini staring at me with wet eyes, of Vico picking apart every answer I gave, of Luca's hand on my back steering me through a room where every man was armed. Nina's asleep at the compound in Lily's room.
I push him again, both palms flat on his chest, and he sits down hard on the edge of the bed.
His jacket's already off. I pull his shirt out of his waistband and he raises his arms when I drag it over his head, which is the second thing he lets me do.
The tattoos run from his collarbone down his ribs, and I've kissed most of them by now, but tonight I'm not here to be gentle about it.
"Gemma." His voice comes out rough. "What do you need?"
"Lie back," I say.
He does.
I get my dress off, and my underwear, and then I climb over him and work his belt open while he watches my face instead of my hands. His cock is already hard when I pull him free, and I take a second just to hold him, to feel the weight of that.
I take his wrists and press them into the mattress above his head.
He could break the hold without thinking about it. His forearms are twice the width of mine and I've seen what those hands do. But his fingers open flat against the sheets and stay there. His pulse jumps under my thumb.
"You're letting me," I say.
"I'm fucking letting you." His eyes don't leave mine. "Take it."
I sink down onto him slow, and the stretch of it pulls a sound out of me I don't recognize. He curses in Italian, low, his hips pressing up before he catches himself and goes still again. I keep his wrists pinned and I start to move.
It's not graceful. I don't care. I ride him hard, my knees digging into the mattress on either side of his hips, and he watches me the whole time with his mouth open, his chest heaving, giving me everything and taking nothing.
Every time I grind down he makes a sound low in his throat that I feel more than hear.
I chose this. Nobody arranged it, nobody ordered it, nobody wrote it into a contract. My hands are the ones holding somebody down for once. My body is the one setting the pace, and when the pressure builds low in my belly I don't slow down to make it last. I chase it.
"That's it," he says through his teeth. "Come on my cock. Let me fucking see it."
I come with his wrists still pinned, my whole body locking up, his name breaking apart in my mouth. The wave of it rolls through me long enough that my arms give out, and I fold down against his chest, shaking, his heartbeat slamming under my cheek.
He gives me maybe five seconds.
Then his hands are free and I'm on my back before I fully register moving, the ceiling swinging past, his weight settling between my thighs. He catches my chin and makes me look at him.
"You need control, I'll give you control. Any night, any goddamn time you ask." His thumb drags across my bottom lip. "But right now you already got what you needed. Now you're going to get fucked properly. Open your legs."
I open them.
He drives back into me in one stroke and it punches the air out of my lungs.
There's nothing careful about it now. He hooks my knee over his arm and fucks me hard enough that the headboard knocks the wall, and I grab his shoulders because I need to hold on to some part of him or come apart entirely.
"Nobody can hear you," he says against my ear. "No kid down the hall. No thin fucking walls. Scream."
I do. I didn't know I had it in me after the roof, after everything, but the second one builds faster than the first and I scream when it hits, loud and ugly and mine.
He growls into my neck and doesn't stop, works me through it until I'm shuddering under him and my heels are digging into the backs of his thighs.
"Fuck—" He pulls out fast, fists himself once, twice, and comes across my breasts in hot stripes, his whole body shaking with it, his head dropped forward and his breath tearing out of him.
I look down at myself. At the mess of him on my skin, at his hand still wrapped around his cock, at the sweat running down the center of his chest.
The hunger should be gone. I just came twice, and my legs are shaking, and any reasonable woman would be done.
I'm not done.
I reach up and drag my finger through what he left on me, and his eyes track the movement, and go dark.
"More," I say.