I'd given him everything. My trust, my body, my belief in a future where someone powerful would choose me and keep me and love me the way I'd never been loved.
The shift was so gradual I didn't see it happening.
First it was my clothes. Too revealing, he said—did I want other men looking at me? Then it was my friends. They were immature, they didn't understand what I was becoming, they would only hold me back. Then it was my thoughts, my opinions, the way I laughed or the way I didn't laugh, the things I said and the things I failed to say.
Nothing I did was ever quite right. I was always disappointing him in small ways that accumulated into something enormous, something that pressed down on my chest until I couldn't breathe. When I pleased him, his attention was a drug—warm and consuming and worth any price. When I disappointed him, the coldness was absolute. Hours of silence. Days, sometimes. He'd look through me like I wasn't there, like I was nothing, and I'd do anything to get the warmth back.
I was seventeen when it ended.
A party at the Rosetti estate. I'd been so excited—he'd finally agreed to be seen with me in public, to acknowledge that what we had was real. I'd worn a green dress that he'd chosen for me, styled my hair the way he liked, practiced my smile until it felt natural.
And then, in front of everyone—my father, my brothers, the heads of half a dozen families—he'd turned to Tomasso and said:
"She's a child. I don't know what you thought was happening, but I have no interest in your daughter."
The words had been casual. Almost bored. Like I was an inconvenience he was finally bothering to address.
I remembered the exact quality of the silence that followed. The way people had looked at me—some with pity, some with contempt, some with the satisfied recognition of watching someone else's humiliation. I remembered my father's face going hard and closed, calculating the damage to the family's reputation. I remembered my brothers shifting uncomfortably, none of them defending me, all of them just waiting for the moment to pass.
I remembered realizing, with perfect clarity, that I was alone.
The therapist had called it grooming. She'd called it abuse. She'd explained, patiently and repeatedly, that what had happened wasn't my fault—that I'd been a child, that he'd been a predator, that the shame I carried didn't belong to me.
I understood all of that intellectually.
It didn't change the fact that tomorrow I would have to stand in the same room as him and pretend none of it had ever happened.
He would look at me, probably. That slow assessment, those pale eyes taking inventory of what I'd become. He might even speak to me—something cordial and empty, the words of a man greeting a stranger. And I would have to respond. I would have to smile. I would have to act like my skin wasn't crawling, likemy chest wasn't caving in, like the girl he'd broken wasn't still screaming somewhere inside me.
At the funeral I’d be caught between Enzo, a monster from my past, and Dante, a tyrant from my future.
Dante.
I'd met him once, I remembered suddenly. A formal dinner between the families when I was twelve and he was twenty. I'd been seated at the far end of the table, the youngest person in the room, invisible in the way children always were at those events. Everyone had talked over me, around me, like I was furniture with a pulse.
Except him.
He'd asked me a question—something simple, something about what books I was reading—and actually waited for the answer. I remembered being so startled that a grown-up was listening to me that I'd stammered through my response like an idiot. But he hadn't laughed. He'd just nodded, said something about liking Jane Austen when he was younger, and gone back to the adult conversation.
It was such a small thing. Probably he didn't remember it at all.
But I did. I remembered that he'd been the only one in that room who'd treated me like a person instead of a decoration.
I pushed the memory away. It didn't matter. Whatever kindness a twenty-year-old Dante Caruso had shown to a twelve-year-old girl had nothing to do with who he was now. He was a mafia don. He was about to inherit me along with his father's empire. Whatever gentleness he might have possessed had probably been beaten out of him by the same world that had taught me to disappear.
Men like him didn't marry for love. They married for power, for alliances, for the legitimacy that a well-bred wife couldprovide. That was what I was to him: a transaction. A bloodline wrapped in an acceptable package.
My only protection was to give him nothing real.
I would be the perfect wife. Beautiful, gracious, compliant. I would manage his household and attend his events and smile at his associates and warm his bed if he required it. I would be everything that was expected of a Moretti bride, everything my father had raised me to be.
But the real Gemma—whoever that even was anymore—would stay locked behind walls so thick that no one could breach them. Not Dante Caruso. Not Enzo Valenti. Not anyone.
I had learned what happened when you gave a powerful man access to your real self. I had learned what it cost to be known, to be seen, to believe that someone's attention meant something more than ownership. I would not make that mistake again.
He would not see me.
Chapter 3
