None of it had ever mattered.
Imadeitthreestepsdown the hallway before my legs remembered they were supposed to be shaking.
The portfolio hung at my side, suddenly heavy. All those numbers. All those carefully cultivated relationships, those restaurant owners in Chicago who'd shaken my hand and said they looked forward to doing business with the Morettis. I'd felt so clever, so strategic. I'd thought I was building something.
I'd been playing house while my father played with empires.
The hallway stretched ahead of me, lined with portraits of Moretti ancestors. Severe men in dark suits, women with careful hair and pearls at their throats. My great-grandmother looked down from her gilt frame with eyes that saw right through me. She'd been traded too, I realized. Brought over from Calabria at seventeen to marry a man she'd never met, to bear his children and manage his household and never once complain about the life she'd been handed.
At least she'd had the decency not to pretend she had choices.
I passed my brother Carlo's room—door open, empty, bed unmade. He was probably at the club, or with whatever girl he was seeing this month, living the life of a Moretti son instead of a Moretti daughter. My brothers had choices. They couldrun businesses, take positions in the family structure, earn their place through work and loyalty. They were groomed to be players.
I was groomed to be played.
Your mother was a Calabrese. My father's voice echoed in my head, patient and final. You have blood ties to three of the five families.
That was what I was. Not a person. A connection. A living document of strategic marriages stretching back generations, valuable only for the names in my bloodline and the alliances they could cement.
I found myself in the conservatory without remembering walking there. The room was all glass and greenery, my mother's favorite space in the house. She used to bring me here to read when I was small, both of us curled on the wicker settee with our respective books, existing in comfortable silence.
The settee was still there. The cushions had been replaced twice since she died, but the frame was the same.
I sat down and stared at the portfolio in my lap.
Six years old. I'd been six years old when my father promised me to Vito Caruso's son. A handshake deal made over brandy and cigars, two men carving up the future while I played with dolls in the nursery upstairs. I didn't learn about it until I was twelve—overheard it, actually, my father telling my oldest brother that the Caruso alliance was "locked in" through me.
Locked in. Like I was a door. A mechanism. Something that secured other, more important things.
I'd cried for three days. Then I'd stopped crying and started planning.
The wine import proposal was supposed to be my escape route. If I could prove my value in business, maybe my father would see that I was worth more to the family free than traded. Maybe he'd let me build something of my own—a career, a life, areason to exist beyond the shape of my face and the names of my grandmothers.
Maybe was a word for fools.
The glass walls of the conservatory pressed in around me. Outside, the Long Island afternoon was gray and still, the kind of weather that made everything feel smaller than it was.
Tomorrow I would attend Vito Caruso's funeral. I would wear a black Valentino dress and stand with my family and watch a man I'd never met be lowered into the ground. And somewhere in that church, Dante Caruso would look at me for the first time and see exactly what my father saw: a bloodline. An alliance. A transaction.
I knew almost nothing about him. Photographs showed a serious man with dark hair and the kind of face that gave nothing away. Thirty-four years old. Harvard Business School, though everyone knew that was mostly for show—what he'd really been studying all those years was how to run a criminal empire. He'd taken over the family business now that his father was dead. The new don. My future husband.
I tried to imagine marrying him and couldn't. The concept refused to solidify into anything real. It was like trying to picture a color you'd never seen.
My phone buzzed. A text from Sofia: Fitting at 4. Don't be late.
The funeral dress. Of course. I had to be fitted for the dress I'd wear while meeting the man who would own me for the rest of my life.
I should have felt something. Anger, maybe, or grief, or the cold clarity of determination. Instead I felt hollow. Scraped clean. Like someone had reached inside me and scooped out everything that could protest or fight or hope.
This was always going to happen. I'd known that, somewhere beneath all my careful planning. The proposal had never been a real escape route—it had been a fantasy I'd constructed tosurvive the waiting. A story I told myself so I could keep getting out of bed in the morning.
The truth was simpler and worse: I had never had a chance.
I set the portfolio on the settee beside me. All those numbers. All that work. In a week, or a month, or whenever the wedding was scheduled, none of it would matter. I would belong to Dante Caruso, and my carefully researched distribution networks would become someone else's project or, more likely, no one's project at all.
A beautiful girl who stayed quiet. That's what I needed to be now.
I'd spent twenty-six years learning how to be exactly that, and I still wasn't sure I was good enough at it to survive.
