Marcello
For some unfathomable reason, my heart is beating a hundred miles an hour inside my chest. I'm nervous as fuck. She bolted from me once, and I'll be damned if I'll allow it to happen again.
She's like an injured wild deer. She needs me to protect her, yet she's afraid to come too close.
I would have given her more time to come to terms with this situation, but time is a luxury we don't have.
Not when I have to puzzle out all the pieces about what is going on with the Vegas family, Edoardo, and Margarita.
I trust my men, they'll keep her safe with their lives if I order them to, but her being my wife will make it more personal. Family is everything to us.
"Yes," she says, and my heart returns to a normal rhythm.
She holds out her hand, and I slide the ring I designed for her onto her finger. It's a perfect fit. She has no idea that this ring has been sitting on my desk since she started working for me. From the moment I opened my eyes and saw her, I knew she would be my wife.
While she took care of me, I had Luciano measure her hands under the guise of ordering custom-fitting gloves. He did well.
"Marcello, it's huge." Her pupils are wide as saucers.
It is. It needs to be. Jewelry is a status symbol inside the women's club of the mafia.
They are going to give Violet a hard time anyway, due to her being a civilian outsider, but wearing the right clothes and jewelry will help.
It will announce that she's mine, and nobody will dare belittle her.
I'm not going to tell her that just yet, though.
There are more important things she needs to know right now, things we need to talk about that won't be easy for her to hear.
"You're to always wear this, even in the shower, capiche?"
A hundred questions reflect through her eyes, and I explain. "Inside the diamond is a tracking device, so I can always find you."
I tense and watch her, ready for another anxiety attack, but she surprises me when she nods. "Okay."
Okay?
"Okay?"
She nods. "Yes. I want to be with you, and if this is the only way, I'm in. As long as I know my family is taken care of."
I laugh dryly, "You make it sound so…" I'm looking for the right word.
"Unromantic?" She supplies.
"Business like." I nod.
"But it's more than that, isn't it?"
"You know damn well it is. I've never proposed to anybody before." I tell her. "We'll work the details out. Trust me?"
"With my life." She answers, tugging at some strings in my heart I didn't know were still alive.
What I feel for her is confusing the hell out of me.
There is the sexual pull, sure, but there is also possessiveness and something tender, something that makes me want to talk to her.
I've never wanted to talk to anybody in my life.
Something furry brushes between us. The fucking cat.
"Felix." Violet purrs. "I think he likes you."
"I'm so happy about that," I deadpan, staring at the four-legged creature I'll be sharing my living arrangements with.
"Pet him," she coaches.
"Violet," I say, rising, "there are some things I won't do, even for you."
She laughs. "He'll win you over, just wait."
Yeah, I have a feeling hell will freeze over before that happens.
I watch her as she smiles down at the cat like she didn't just say yes to marrying a man who's spilled more blood than he'll ever confess. Like she hasn't just let me track her, claim her, own her.
She reaches for my hand, regarding the ring on her finger thoughtfully. "Can I ask you something?"
My muscles tighten instinctively. "You can ask."
Her voice is softer now, barely above a whisper. "Are you marrying me because you love me… or because it's the best way to protect me?"
Fuck. That question.
I turn away for a second, staring at the skyline beyond the window.
My jaw flexes. I'm considering lying, but she deserves honesty.
So I give her what I can. "I'm marrying you because I don't know how to be without you anymore.
" My voice comes out low and gruff. "Because the thought of you walking away again?
That nearly killed me. And yeah, protecting you is part of it—but it's not the reason. It's the consequence."
I glance back at her, and her eyes glisten as if she doesn't know what to say.
"You want me to say it clean? Fine. I want you. I need you. I'm better when you're near, and I'm fucking worse when you're gone. And maybe I don't know what love is, not the way you want it wrapped in flowers and white lace, but what I feel for you? It's real. And it's not going anywhere."
Silence hums between us. Then she steps forward, presses her palm to my chest, right over my heart.
"I don't need flowers, Marcello," she says. "Just don't lie to me. And don't leave me behind."
I pull her in until her body melts against mine, and I bury my face in her hair. "Not in this life. Not in the next."
But I can feel it. The want lingering between us.
Three little words. Three little words I've never spoken aloud in my life.
Words I've never said to anybody. Not my mother.
Not my sister. Definitely not to my bastard of a father or that rotten excuse of a brother.
Not even to Zia Rosa—though she's probably the only one who's ever truly deserved to hear them from me.
My mother loved my father with a kind of devotion that should've been noble—but it wasn't. Some might call it tragic.
I call it pathetic. She had royal blood running through her veins, a true mafia principessa, and he treated her like dirt under his boot.
He was a street rat who clawed his way to the top by swinging fists and stepping on necks.
He hated her for being everything he wasn't born to be, and she loved him for reasons I still can't understand, maybe because he pretended to love her sometimes, maybe because he broke her down until even the scraps of his attention felt like something sacred.
I watched her worship a man who degraded her every chance he got, and it made me sick.
Sick to see how she clung to his empty gestures, how she smiled at compliments like they weren't just currency to buy her silence.
I remember the nights they would leave for parties—her with her hopes high, him already halfway drunk.
And the nights they came back… all screaming and broken glass.
I would hide in my room, fists clenched, wishing I were older, bigger, strong enough to stop it.
I tried, at first. When I was six, eight, ten—I would stand between them, shouting, pushing at his chest like it would make a difference.
It didn't. And what killed me more than anything was the look in her eyes every time I did.
Loathing. She didn't want me to interfere; she wanted me to leave her and my father alone.
Somewhere along the way, she started to believe that any attention, even the cruel kind, was love.
By the time I was a teenager, I stopped trying.
Stopped watching. Stopped caring. I'd disappear when they left for events, so that I wouldn't have to see the aftermath when they came back.
And when she died—it wasn't dramatic. Not a bullet.
Not a betrayal. She just… faded. I think it was a broken heart.
It was the moment she finally accepted that Carlos Orsi never loved her.
The day after we buried her, that bastard father of mine put me on a plane to Sicily like I was nothing more than a loose end.
Sophia and Zia Rosa—they're the only ones who ever gave me love that didn't come with conditions.
And I think I love them back in my own way.
But even to them, saying it aloud feels like a betrayal of everything I've learned.
That love is weakness. A game of leverage.
A setup for pain. My mother said I love you a thousand times, but never once did she protect me.
Never once did she step between me and his cruelty.
She let him hit me. Let him leave me behind while he paraded Angelo around like a little crown prince.
For years, I wondered what was so wrong with me that he couldn't even bother to hate me properly. Why did he give everything to Angelo and leave me scraps? And then one day I realized—being ignored by him was the best thing that could've happened to me.
So, no—I don't say I love you. Those words taste like broken promises, cowardice, and pain. I show what I feel. With my body. With my protection. With loyalty and blood and fire. That's the only way I know how.
But Violet?
She's not asking for my fire or my fury. She's not asking me to die for her. She just wants to hear me say it. And I fucking can't.
So, here we are. I pull back just enough to see her face. Her eyes are wide, searching. She's looking for reassurance, for something that goes deeper than rings and promises of safety. I press my forehead to hers.
"You asked me if I'm marrying you for protection or because I love you," I say, my voice barely a growl now. "And I told you I need you. That's the truth. But there are things I never learned how to say, Violet. Things I never had the right to say before. Not like this."
Her hand slides up my chest and rests at the base of my neck. "Then show me."
"I will," I promise. "Every fucking day. I'll show you in the way I keep you safe. The way I fight for you. The way I come home to you—no matter what kind of hell is chasing me."
Her eyes soften. She leans up and presses a kiss to the corner of my mouth, whispering against my skin. "That's a start."
And maybe one day, when I can wrap my head around what I'm already feeling, I'll give her the words too.
But for now, this is what I have.
And I hope to God it's enough.