I ignore Harrison’s first four texts because Vasso’s eyes have developed a way of finding my face even when he’s laughing with someone else, and I can’t bear to be read like that right now. I wait until the yacht reception thins, until Mara corrals a pair of analysts into looking at a prototype of the lighthouse app, and Vasso is drawn into a discussion about carbon-negative supply chains with a man who enjoys hearing himself say “circularity.”
Then I step into the cool of the lower salon and call the number I told myself I wouldn’t.
He picks up on the first ring, which is how I know he’s been waiting to pounce. “Princess.”
“I’m calling to confirm the necklace arrived,” I say, keeping my voice flat. “You have what you wanted. You’ll hold your tongue.”
He laughs softly, a knife on velvet. “A trinket for my silence? Please. You married the housekeeper’s son just to get ahead. Don’t sell me some bullshit about soul mates the way you’re trying so hard to peddle to the tabloids. Ambition clearly runs in the family. Let’s make this useful.”
Feed the monster and it only grows. Hungers for more.
It’s a lesson I forgot. To my cost. “I’m hanging up.”
“You’ll want to hear the request,” he says, and manages to make request sound like extortion with better vowels. “Smooth things over with that upstart husband of yours and get me a position in his company. Optics role. Senior enough to make me respectable.”
I actually do laugh then, because the suggestion is so ridiculous a lesser woman would choke on it. “You want a job from Vasso. The man you sent to the back steps. The man whose father you?—”
“Careful,” he croons. “Or I’ll forget I’m speaking to blood. I don’t care if it’s a fake title. Have your billionaire print you a business card, darling. Get me in the building. Or I tell every reporter whose number I still own that your marriage is a time-limited merger and the island renaming is a performance piece.”
“No,” I say, because the word has bones and I need to feel them. “Find someone else to launder you.”
A beat of silence. Then he changes masks; I can hear it in the rearrangement of air. “Very well. Twenty million, and I go away.”
My grip tightens on the rail until the tendons in my wrist sing. “If you call me again, I’m done pretending we share anything except DNA.”
He tsks. “Naomi, Naomi. You were always sentimental. I’ll text the account details.”
I hang up because if I don’t I’ll say something that will have to be forgiven. I turn my phone off because off is the only safe word I have left. Off doesn’t shut my head up. Off doesn’t change the math that says a diamond bought me two days of quiet and a new demand costed like ransom.
Up on the main deck, Naples lights begin to prickle the horizon.
Vasso finds me at the rail with two flutes of something pale and celebratory and sets one in my hand without comment. He’s changed for dinner—open collar, linen cut to suggest wicked sin, a ring glinting on his thumb, the kind of man a camera will always be a little in love with. I want to lean into him and let the weight of this day find other shoulders. I want to shove him, just to feel something else.
“I thought we’d head to Milan after Amalfi,” he says lightly, as if mentioning weather. “My assistant has organized it. Two days. Wedding fittings, logistics. My mother will come if you’d like her to. Eleni will bully the dressmaker for you.”
I stiffen even as something in me snaps like thread pulled once too often. “Why are you bothering?” The words are out before I can sand them. “You could take any heiress who hasn’t wrecked her family name and parade her in tulle. You could get a wife with fewer fractures. You could?—”
His eyes sharpen the way a blade does when a whetstone finally hits the right angle. “What exactly are you asking me to confirm, Naomi? That you’re unworthy? That I should have married someone easier? That your self-hatred gets a vote in our logistics?”
“Oh, forgive me for not swooning over ‘our logistics,’” I bite back, heat rising like a flush I can’t scrub off. “Forgive me for not wanting to preen in Milan while your COO drafts org charts and?—”
“And what?” he says, too even. “And you send secret texts every time I’m not looking?”
Shock freezes me. And his mouth twists.
“Should I guess who it is or are you going to come clean?”
“Vasso—”
“It can’t be Leo Fucking Goldstein,” he seethes through gritted teeth. “Even you know better than that?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He leans in closer, brushes my ear with his lips. “It means you love your grandpa too much to be that foolish, wife. So let me guess the next worst thing. Daddy Dearest?”
That lands. I shouldn’t flinch but I do. “I’m containing him.”
“Containing,” he repeats, and the word sits between us like a covered dish everyone knows is ugly underneath. He looks at me the way you look at a pot you have touched and been burned by. “Is that what we’re calling it this time?”
