Chapter 17 Enrico
ENRICO
Curtains were half-drawn against a pale sun, the light cut into long, obedient columns that stopped at the edge of my desk.
I had been at there since before dawn, but the ledger laid closed.
My father’s chair creaked under my weight when I shifted.
The sound was a memory: of his boots on parquet, the thud of a palm on this very wood when a man lied, a lesson snatched out of the air and turned into law.
Control is the only reliable language, he used to say. I always believed him—mostly. Until last night, when Mia said my name in the dark.
Footsteps moved down the corridor: measured, aware, unafraid enough to be reckless. Not Marco. Not a servant.
I didn’t stand. I flattened one palm on the desk and kept my eyes on the door.
The handle turned. She entered without knocking.
She braided her hair low against her neck.
Simple dress, bare throat, no jewelry except the ring I’d placed on her finger in front of half the city’s elite.
The light from the hall haloed her for a heartbeat before the dark took her in and made her sharpen. She closed the door behind her.
“Good morning, my love.”
“Is it?” She crossed the room and stopped a safe distance from the desk. “We’re going to find that out.”
I gestured to the chair opposite. She didn’t sit. “You’re angry.”
She laughed once—small and humorless. “That’s one word for it.”
Silence is a knife. The longer you hold it steady, the more it meant. I waited until the blade found its angle.
“Tell me about Lily.”
My breath moved, deliberate. Lily. A girl who stuck her nose where it didn’t belong.
“Catrina talks too much.”
“She talked just enough. I asked for the truth.”
The old instinct rose—deflect, redirect, bury the truth under bigger truths until the room forgets what it asked for. Mia’s eyes didn’t move from mine. “You ordered her death?”
“Yes.”
She didn’t flinch outwardly, but something in her posture shifted—the smallest recoil of a person bracing after the impact arrived. She stepped closer to the desk, palms pressed lightly to its edge, as if she needed the coolness of the wood to keep her from catching fire.
“Why?” No screaming, no theatrics—just the question pulled down to the bone.
“Because she could have destroyed you. Not with malice, perhaps, but with carelessness. She had a mouth that didn’t understand the price. She liked the way danger made her feel. She asked questions where she didn’t need to.”
Mia’s jaw tightened. “She was my friend.”
“She was only using you for a high.”
Her eyes flashed. “So you had her fucking killed? To keep me safe, right? Because only you can do that.”
“I removed a threat,” I answered. “Exactly what I promised to do for you when that contract was signed between our families.”
She shook her head and took a half-step back, as if distance could free the word promised from the blood stuck to it. “You promised me nothing. You promised yourself ownership.”
She glanced past me, to the maps on the wall, to the decanter, to the scar in the desk my father had left with a ring when rage got the better of him. Then back to me. “When?”
“Night of the charity gala at the museum. You wore black. Your friend was talking to two men who kept asking questions about you and your family name. What business you did… one slip and the Moretti’s would all be in prison. So I did what I had to do.”
Mia’s face didn’t change. But her hands curled against the desk. “And you call that love?”
“It kept you and your family from ending up in prison or worse. Many of our enemies were in attendance. I call it the decision that traded two, maybe more coffins for one.”
She swallowed once, hard enough that the small motion drew my eyes to her throat. “Tell me something else. Would you tell me if there were others?”
“There aren’t.”
I stood then, slowly, as if the chair might make a sound that would ruin the one still moment we had between us. I didn’t come around the desk. I didn’t close the space. I learned early how to make distance feel like respect instead of calculation, and right now I wanted to mean it.
“My father taught me that love is a leash. That the man who holds it wins. That owning is safer than wanting, and wanting is safer than needing, and needing is a death sentence. He kept my mother like a doll and called it love. She smiled in frames and learned to be grateful.”
Mia’s eyes flicked to the corner of the room where my mother’s photograph hung, small and almost hidden, the only softness in a space built for command. I rarely looked at it. This morning, I had.
“I told myself I wouldn’t rule the way he did the day I saw you.”
Silence stayed there for two minutes. Neither of us said a word.
“I told Marco this morning that we will be staying in separate rooms as long as you want. Many might find that odd, but I won’t make you sleep with me. One day, I hope your feelings for me will match, but just remember, I’m devoted to you and only you. And I will worship you if given the chance.”
Mia stepped closer to the desk. Not much. An inch, maybe two. Enough to tell me she risked my gravity field and see if it crushed her.
“What did Lily do,” she asked, “that made you sure she would hurt me and my family?”
I wanted to teach myself the discipline of distance where Mia was concerned. Discipline had been a religion I practiced. I failed it that night.
“She told a man that you were tired of being a Moretti and wanted a normal life. That you wanted to move away.”
Mia let out a breath that trembled at the end of it. “She said that?”
“Yes, to a man who would have put you in a car that night and called your father to sell your return. She was a bomb with a lit fuse, just waiting to go off.”
Mia closed her eyes for a moment—one long blink, the kind a person used to hold tears back by force. When she opened them, there was grief in them.
“You took her from me,” she said. “And I didn’t even know it was you.”
I didn’t look away. “Yes.”
“Do you know what it’s like,” she asked, voice steady and not at all, “to lose the only person who knew me before I became a commodity? Another Moretti daughter opened up to someday be married off only to help form alliances?”
“No. I could never understand that view. My love, I can’t give you Lily back. But if anyone else tried to hurt you, I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
Mia studied me as if the answer were written in a place I had not thought to hide. “What do you want from me right now?”
“I want you not to run. I want you to tell me the rules. And I want you to hold me accountable to the man I swore I would be when I said I do.”
She took a slow step to the side and ran her fingers along the edge of the desk. The touch raised gooseflesh under my shirt, which I resented and cherished in equal measure.
“I don’t know how to be your wife. We barely know anything about each other.”
“Be yourself. That’s who I fell for. Attitude and all.” I laughed. “And you might not know much about me, but my love, my knowledge of you is a laundry list. You have to remember, you have been my obsession for over five years.”
Something in her mouth softened—an unplanned line of almost-smile that vanished as quickly as it came. “You think you can be different.”
“I am learning how to be good. For you.”
We stared at each other across everything we had broken and built.
“Tell me about last night,” she said suddenly, and the ground moved under both our feet. “Not the ceremony. Not the announcement. You. What you thought when it was just us.”
The answer arrived in the back of my mouth like I had been saving it there.
“I thought of my father’s hand on a leash,” I said, “and how short he kept it. I thought of how ownership looks like safety from the outside. I thought of the word mine. I told myself I was nothing like him. And then you said my name, and I understood why he failed.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to own you because I did not trust the world not to take you from me. I kissed you and the bridge between who I had been and who I swore I’d be was finally under my feet.”
We let that live between us until it had a shape.
“You think the priest can absolve you?” she asked, a sideways arrow, not unkind.
“I don’t ask him to,” I said. “I ask him to look at me the way God might, if God believed men like me could change.”
“And do you?” she asked.
“I believe.”
A knock sounded—two soft taps.“What?”
Marco opened the door just enough to be a presence, not an interruption. “Apologies,” he said. “Reports from the south. Quiet. And the lawyer called. He wants to finalize the transfer paperwork for the townhouse on Via Serena.”
Mia’s eyes flicked to me. “Townhouse?”
“For you,” I said, without looking away from her. “If you want it. I won’t put your name on anything you don’t choose.”
Marco tracked the current between us. “I’ll wait outside,” he said, and closed the door again.
She moved then—past the chair, around the corner of the desk, into the thin space where the scent of jasmine on my shirt could reach her. She didn’t touch me.
“I hate what you did,” she said. It was almost gentle, which made it worse. “I hate that you think safety and love are the same language. But…”
I held the breath that sentence promised to shape.
“But I am not my father’s bargaining chip,” she said. “And I will not be your penance. You will not speak for me. You will not use me as a story. And you will never—never—take my choices from me again.”
“I hear you.”
She came closer. “Say it back to me.”
“I will not speak for you,” I said, the vow making itself precise as it left my mouth. “I will not use you. I will not take your choice away.”
Her eyes searched my face for the lie. I didn’t give her one.
“And Lily?” she asked. “What do I do with that?”
“I made the call and saved your life. She wasn’t the person you thought, M. Don’t let it worry you now.”