LORIK
Her eyes go wide, and her pretty mouth drops open, and for one whole breath my brat has nothing to say.
I commit it to memory. It won’t last.
“Bring her a dram of Scotch,” I tell Cas, my gaze never leaving her. “Her throat’s too parched to keep insulting me properly.”
Casimir pushes off the bar with a low laugh and goes to pour it. Brooklyn’s eyes track him across the room, then drift to the priest in the corner, and I watch the truth of where she is and what’s about to happen finally land.
Her chest starts to rise and fall too fast, that creamy skin above the neckline of her tank top flushing, and God help me, I have to lock my jaw against the saliva pooling in my mouth.
She’s terrified. She’s hiding it well. That’s the part that levels me. Not the beauty, though there’s enough of it to start wars. It’s the spine. She woke up drugged in a stranger’s bed with a gun and a priest in the room and her first move was to threaten to kill me.
I have never wanted anything the way I want this woman, and she’s the one thing I can never let myself have on those terms. Not yet.
“You going to fuck her now,” Cas says, crossing back with the glass, “or give her your last name first?” He holds the Scotch out toward her, all easy charm, his accent buried so deep you’d never find it. “You could always have mine, sweetheart. I’m the nicer one.”
She’s off the bed before his hand finishes moving.
She knocks the Scotch out of Cas’s hand as she passes. The glass shatters across the floor. Cas looks down at the spreading stain, then up at me, and grins. “I like her.”
Bare feet on the floor, three inches of height she doesn’t have, and still she gets right up into my space, chin tipped back, eyes blazing up at me like I’m something she’s going to take apart.
“Touch me,” she says, soft and deadly, “and it’ll be the last thing you feel before I paralyze you from the neck down.”
I almost smile.
“Jiu-jitsu. A green-black belt, the highest one they hand out in the youth divisions. They gave it to you at thirteen because you kept choking out near-grown men and ran out of colors to award you. The previous Caputo boss started you at five. Your father took over when he was killed.” I let her feel the weight of exactly how much of her I carry around.
Domenico, her stepmom, all of them have played a role in her training. “Go ahead, baby girl. Show me.”
Her nostrils flare. Her fists curl at her sides.
There it is. The tell. The one her dad has tried to break her of a hundred times but she’s never once heard him. She announces every strike a half-second before she throws it. To anyone else it’s nothing. To me, who has studied this woman the way other men study God, it’s a billboard.
Her knee comes up for my groin.
I catch it in my palm and push it down, and in the same motion my hand closes around the front of her throat. Not crushing, never crushing, just enough, and I walk her backward and put her flat on the bed and follow her down, straddling her waist before she can drag in a full breath.
Her eyes go huge.
“You think I’d take a woman,” I say, leaning over her, close enough to breathe her in, “and not learn her every weakness and every strength first, sweetheart?”
My grip is firm and exactly as careful as everything else I’ve done tonight.
It won’t bruise. I checked the dose, I checked the chamber, I’ll check the marks on her skin in the morning.
Because the one thing I will not do, the one line in all of this I’d put myself in the ground before I crossed, is leave damage on her.
“You telegraph your knees. You drop your left when you’re tired.
You sleep on the side of the bed nearest the door because some part of you has always known a night like this was coming.
” I tilt my head. “I know you better than the boy you were texting ever will. Better than anyone in that family you’d die for. ”
“My family.” She laughs. It’s low and ugly and somehow still beautiful. “You really don’t know what you’ve done, do you, pretty man. My father is going to put you in the ground with his bare hands. And if he doesn’t get to you first, my uncle will. Trust me—you want my dad. You do not want Dom.”
“Domenico Caputo.” I say it like it bores me, because it does.
“The Italian-American boss. Married up into the Russians and the Irish, sits on top of all three like a king who thinks the crown ended the war.” I lower my mouth to her ear.
“I’m counting on him coming, Brooklyn. I taped him an invitation to the mirror you were primping in.
I want him in my house. I want every last one of them in my house. ”
It silences her, long enough for me to watch her recalculate, to watch her understand that her family’s wrath isn’t a threat to me. It’s the entire point.
“Then you’re insane,” she finally breathes.
“Almost certainly.”
“Get. Off. Me.”
“In a moment.” I don’t move. There is a rightness to being over her that I don’t want to admit even to myself. “First you’re going to listen, because I only have the patience to say this once, and our guest—” I flick my eyes toward the priest. “Has somewhere to be.”
She stops fighting the hold. Not surrendering. Conserving. Smart girl.
“Tonight does not end with you walking out of here,” I tell her.
“It ends with you my wife. That part isn’t a negotiation.
The only thing you get to choose is how.
The easy way: I let you up, you walk into that bathroom, and you put on the dress hanging behind the door.
We say a few words, you sign a piece of paper, the good Father blesses it, and it’s done.
” I let the next part drop into my voice, slow and flat.
“The hard way: I strip you out of those clothes myself, and I marry you with nothing on you but my ring, and Casimir takes the photographs while you stand there, and those are the ones I send to your father.”
Her throat works under my hand. “You’re disgusting.”
“I’m thorough,” I correct. “There’s a difference. You’ll learn it.”
“Why?” It isn’t really a question. It’s a demand. “Whatever my family did to yours, I didn’t do it. Marrying me doesn’t settle anything.”
“It settles everything.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” I agree. “It isn’t.”
“You haven’t even told me your name.”
“You’ll have it soon enough. You’re about to take it.”
“I’m not signing anything.”
“You will.”
“You can’t make a person consent. There are laws—”
“Baby, I am the law in this city. I have senators who’ll swear they witnessed it and a judge who’ll backdate the license to last Tuesday if I ask him nicely.
” I watch the hope drain out of her, and I despise that I’m the one draining it.
“There’s no cavalry coming through that door in time.
There’s no clever thing you can say that walks you out of this room unmarried.
The sooner you quit hunting for the exit, the sooner this stops being the worst night of your life. ”
“It’s already the worst night of my life.”
“Then it can only get better,” I say, and I mean it, and she has no idea how much.
What I don’t tell her is what this is doing to me. That holding her down while she hates me is splitting me clean down the middle, that half of me wants to punish her for tonight, for the text messages, for forcing my hand, and the half wants to get on my knees and beg.
She can never know how close those two halves are. She can never know that the gun on my thigh has been empty since before she opened her eyes, that I unloaded it and checked the chamber three times because I could not stomach the thought of a single live round in the same room as her.
This marriage has to be real in every way but one.
I’m not doing it for love. I’m doing it for blood.
For a brother I didn’t even like, for a mother I’d happily bury, for a debt the men she calls family carved into my life thirteen years ago.
She is the price of it. The means to bring every one of them to their knees.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway. I almost believe it.
She still hasn’t answered. She just stares up at me with that infuriating mix of fear and defiance, breathing hard, and giving me nothing.
So I give her something instead.
I ease my grip from her throat, slide my hand down her arm, and bring the weapon up. Her eyes flick to it and back to me, and the defiance flickers, just once, before she locks it down again.
I position the barrel to rest against the bridge of her nose. Cold steel on warm skin. She doesn’t flinch, and I hate her a little for how much I love that she doesn’t.
“Your family can open a text message,” I say quietly, “and find a lovely photograph of the two of us. My beautiful bride.” I drag the barrel down, over the bridge of her nose, across her parted lips, beneath her jaw, down the line of her throat to the neckline of her shirt, and lower, until the cold metal rests between her breasts.
Her chest heaves against it. “Or they can unzip a bag, and find a used—” I let it sink.
“Broken.” I glide the weapon back over her, stopping at her temple. “Bloody little doll inside.”
The word lands the way I knew it would. Doll. Her pupils blow wide. Something moves behind her eyes that I don’t have time to name.
For a long, long moment, the only sound in the room is her breathing and the ice settling in Cas’s glass.
Then my soon-to-be wife closes her eyes, and when she opens them the fight has gone somewhere deep where she can keep it, and her voice comes out level and cold and entirely her own.
“Get the gun out of my face, and get off me,” she says, “and I’ll put on your dress.”
I ease back, and rise, and offer her my hand.
She doesn’t take it. She gets up on her own, chin high, and walks toward the bathroom door like she’s walking to a ring instead of an altar.
And somewhere under the triumph, in the part of me I keep locked even from Cas, something that has been starving for eighteen long months finally, quietly, begins to feed.
At the door she stops, one hand flat on the frame, and doesn’t turn around. “When my family kills you,” she tells the wood, “I’m going to ask to watch.”
“I’d expect nothing less from my wife.”
She’s going to ruin me.
I watch the bathroom door close behind her and find that I don’t care at all.