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 saidour fatherlike 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 readproperty 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?”
