Chapter 15 Enrico
ENRICO
Dawn crept across the city like a slow confession. Pale light bled through the edges of the study curtains. Jasmine lingered on my shirt. Her scent. I hadn’t slept.
The ledger laid open on my desk: columns, sums, the clean logic of an empire that never lied to me.
Numbers told the truth even when men didn’t.
But my eyes wouldn’t stay on the ink. They kept straying back to the memory of her mouth when she first said my name last night in the dark—soft, disbelieving, like a question and an answer at once.
I told myself I had done what was necessary. The marriage forced the hands that needed forcing: Moretti’s enemies would think twice. And still, beneath the solidity of those decisions, something shifted.
Guilt was a strange guest in my house. It wasn’t welcome, but it made itself comfortable anyway.
The door opened with Marco slipping inside. The collar of his jacket turned up against the wind. “You should sleep.”
“I will.” I closed the ledger. “When this is all over.”
He huffed—half a laugh, half a prayer for patience. “Then never.”
I turned from the window and leaned back on the desk, palms to the cool wood. “Gotta report for me?”
“The south docks are steady. We’ve got a new rotation in place, men we trust watching.” He ticked items off. “The crews on Third took delivery at four. Clean. No tails. I’ve tightened the outer perimeter here at the house—new eyes, no one gets within a block without a face we know.”
“And Russo?”
“Quiet.” A pause, then a glance sharp enough to draw blood.
“Good.” The word tasted like a lie. “Keep it that way.”
He nodded but didn’t leave. “So,” he said at last, carefully. “She’s your wife now.”
A muscle in my jaw tightened. “She is.” My brother wasn’t a man of feelings. He may someday marry, but it wouldn’t be for love. If anything, it’d be for survival or carrying on the family name.
“And does she understand what that means?”
“More than most, actually.”
Marco’s mouth pressed into a line. “With respect, you took her choice away.”
He was right; I didn’t have to like it. Power gave me the luxury of making everyone else wrong. It did not erase the echo of truth when it hit the wall.
Marco moved closer to the desk and lowered his voice. “Catrina was seen last night arguing with the priest before he arrived. She didn’t want this for Mia.”
“Catrina forgets herself.” I let the steel slide into my tone, a reminder. “And so do you.”
He didn’t flinch. “I’m here to teach. You win people like Mia one way only: you give them a choice.”
“And what choice would that be, exactly?” I asked, even though I already knew.
He crossed his arms. “The choice to walk—and to be wanted, anyway.”
I smiled without humor. “You want me to leave the door open and ask her to choose me.”
“I want you to remember who she is,” he said. “Or you’ll make her into exactly what our father would have wanted: a crown with no pulse underneath. I know you don’t want a wife like that.”
He said our father like a curse. The word shifted something hot and old in the spine.
“Get me the final numbers from the warehouses. And put an extra set of eyes on the house. The garden side.”
“Understood.” He made for the door, then turned back. “Enrico.”
I stopped and gave him my attention.
“There’s nothing you could do that would make me leave your side. You know that. But I’m telling you the truth. I saw her last night. She wasn’t scared of you. She feared not being herself anymore.”
He left me with the ash of that sentence.
I sat, and the leather groaned, and the dawn crawled another inch up the curtains.
There are some truths a man puts off like appointments with the dead.
I’d sat with mine for years: control was cleaner than love.
Men could be bought or broken. The city answered to the hand that held the knife steady longest.
But the past did not always agree with my conclusions.
My father liked blood to be personal. When I was seven, he cut a man’s palm and pressed their hands together so the oath would be sealed with both lives. “Men lie to avoid pain,” he told me. “Make pain the truth, and they stop lying.”
He ran this city like a surgeon with a grudge: precise cuts, no anesthesia.
He taught me to love order because chaos put a bullet through his brother and his father and almost through me.
He taught me that wives were for sons and alliances and the illusion of softness—but never for counsel.
My mother lived beautifully in a prison; she smiled because he gave her everything except himself.
She died with pretty rings on her fingers.
I buried her and promised myself I wouldn’t build that kind of empire.
I would build one that didn’t tremble when I slept.
I would build one where fear served me, not the other way around.
I would build one where the person who shared my bed was not a portrait on a wall with a plaque under it that might as well have read property of.
Last night I broke my own promise.
A memory rose—uninvited, stubborn, soft. Not the part anyone saw: not the priest’s worn Bible, not the toast, not the corridor swallowing the applause when I stole her from the room. I remembered after.
The door closed. She stood a step from me, the world flickering across her face—the fury, the fear, the way desire tripped over both and refused to apologize. I said her name to hear how it sounded when it wasn’t a threat. Mia.
“Look at me,” I’d said. Not command—plea. She did. God help me, she did. Her eyes were a storm I’d tried not to sail into for years. When I kissed her, it hadn’t been gentle. It had been honest. And when she kissed me back—only then—I knew I was fucked.
The memory receded. I let it go and let the present move back in. Business waited on the desk. I opened the ledger again because it was the language I spoke best when the one I needed abandoned me.
A knock, soft and careful this time. Father Antonio slipped inside.
“Did you marry her for love or for power?”
“Is it bad to admit both?”
He inclined his head and then glanced toward the window. “Love asks for a choice. Power does not.”
When he was gone, the study grew too small.
I stood and crossed to the maps pinned. Borders marked in red string, pins for supply lines and loyalty and hazard.
I traced the line where our world rubbed raw against the other families, the thin seam in the south where Russo used to press hardest. Quiet now, yes.
For how long? Quiet has a way of hiding teeth.
Did our last attack kill him or was this all a facade to make me think so?
I found the pin that marked Moretti territory and the lighter red line that had always been there between us, called respect when it was convenient and truce when it was not.
Last night, I’d stitched that line shut in front of every eye that mattered.
The city would call it peace. It was not peace.
It was a promise of violence deferred, and it was a vow I intended to keep.
I thought of my father again, of the way he would have celebrated—a cigar, a woman on his knee who wasn’t his wife, men pounding his back with congratulations.
He would have liked what I did and hated why I did it.
He would have called Mia beautiful and useless.
He would have told me to give her diamonds but keep her silent.
I had a different vision in my head for what a wife was.
Not a portrait. Not a prize. The question that wouldn’t leave me alone was simple: would she ever choose to be anything more with me?
The doorknob turned. I didn’t look up right away; I knew the weight of footsteps in this house better than I knew my own pulse.
Marco again. He closed the door with his hip, carrying a tray I hadn’t asked for. Coffee, black. Toast I would not eat.
“You’ll need it,” he said, setting it down. “She’s awake.”
The cup paused halfway to my mouth. “And?”
“She’s in the east room of the gallery.”
I set the cup down. The urge to go to her was immediate and stupid. “Say what you’re going to say. Then leave.”
He peered at the window, at the slit of color pushing past grey, then back at me. “Let her come to the study.”
“You think I should sit and wait like a teenager.” Marco might be single, but this advice made sense. The last thing I needed to do right now was smother her.
“I think you should take your hands off the board and see if she moves a piece on her own.”
Control was everything to someone like me. And relinquishing that even to my wife… difficult. “I’m not sure that can be done.”
He shrugged. “On the business front, there’s talk already.”
“Let them talk.”
“There’s talk about Catrina,” he corrected. “Some men think she tried to stop the ceremony. Some think she didn’t try hard enough.”
“I will handle Catrina.”
He nodded once. “Handle her as our sister, not your soldier.”
“That depends on whether she remembers which she is first.”
He didn’t bother to hide the look.
“Go,” I said. “And keep the perimeter tight.”
I took the chair behind the desk—the one my father had sat in when he taught me that men are easiest to control when they believe they have a choice.
It wasn’t lost on me that I had forgotten his lesson at the exact moment it mattered most. The second hand on the clock above the bookcase moved slow.
I could win wars. I could wait for her to come to me. Ten minutes.
Nine. I thought of the dress she wore last night. The diamonds at her throat. I wanted to take it off her with my teeth. Instead I’d pressed my mouth to her knuckles in front of men who paid hired killers to make less bold declarations.
Eight. The window at the end of the gallery faced east. She would be standing there with her hands braced on the sill because that was how a woman stood when she intended not to cry, and I had no business knowing that. I’d taken her like property.
Seven. The way my father’s voice could make a room smaller. I’d used that voice on half the city, but when I used it on her, the room shrank.
Six. The coffee tasted like ass. So I called for a fresh batch to be made.
Five. The house woke—footsteps on the back stairs.
Four. I thought of asking for flowers for our room.
Three. Who did I want to be now that I had everything I’d said I wanted?
Two. A shadow crossed the frosted glass of the study door. It paused. My breath did something unwise.
One. The handle turned.
The door opened a fraction. She didn’t step in right away. She stood on the threshold, the hall’s pale light cutting around her like a halo. Her hair was gathered at the nape of her neck; her hands were empty. She had put on a simple dress.
“Good morning. Come in.”
The door clicked shut behind her.
“Coffee?”
“Yes.”
I poured. The cup trembled in my hand for a fraction before I willed it still. I handed it to her without letting our fingers touch. She sipped, winced—black was a language not everyone spoke—and set the cup down on the edge of the desk like a piece on a board she was still evaluating.
“How did you sleep?”
“Toss and turned. It’s a new bed and house for me. I’ve never slept well in other places. You?”
“I only stayed in bed for an hour after you passed out.”
It might have been longer than that. She could leave me tomorrow, so I wanted to take in every night I’d have with her before it was too late.
“You married me without asking.”
No rage in it. No tears. “Yes, I didn’t trust time not to steal you. Or someone else to win your heart.”
She absorbed that with the quiet of someone who knew exactly how much time could rot a thing meant to last. “You can’t keep me by force.”
“I can keep you and never use force.”
Everything coming out of my mouth this morning was disgusting. But the thought of losing her already… killed me inside.
“My father would call this a pretty cage.”
“Your father might prefer cages, but I will never lock you in one.”
She glanced at the ledger, at the maps, at the chair my father used to fill, at the ring on her finger, at my mouth, at the scar on my knuckle I’d earned the first time I made a man bigger than me understand I would not yield. “I don’t know how to be your wife.”
“Good,” I said, and meant it. “We’ll figure it out together.”
Something in her face shifted—caution making room for the smallest, uninvited thing: curiosity. It wasn’t forgiveness. It was a truce offered by a general who still had artillery pointed at your front gate.
From the hallway came footsteps that knew better than to interrupt. Marco’s voice low, direct, the word perimeter floating in and out like a tide. The world resumed, as it always did.
I stepped out from behind the desk and came to stand on her side. Close enough to feel the way the air changed around her. Not touching. “Breakfast,” I said. “Then you show me which room will be yours until you decide otherwise.”
“You don’t want me to share a bed with you?” she asked, eyes narrowed.
“I would like nothing more, but something tells me you need more time. Even after last night. Sit.” She glowered at the chair as if sitting were an oath. Then did so.
Outside, the river caught the first hard light of the day. The city pulled itself together for another performance of power and fear. My father’s voice said that empires didn’t bend for love. My mother’s silent portrait—somewhere down the hall—disagreed.
Possession was easy. Protection was instinct.