I timed it perfectly, even if I do say so myself. I entered just as the ceremony was starting and everyone’s attention was on the bride and groom. With the crowd distracted and the Salvatores’ security poor, it was comparatively easy to get into the cathedral, though I have to admit that I didn’t intend to put hands on Caterina Salvatore myself.
She stood at the altar, very tall and straight in a strapless, ivory silk gown that billowed around her like a cloud. Her long black hair had been piled on top her head in complicated curls, with a jewelled tiara crowning her, green eyes glinting at me from behind the silk of her veil.
The little girl I remembered from all those years ago was now a woman, and one who held herself like an empress.
I was expecting her to scream or at least to cower as I strode down the aisle towards her, yet she did neither. She was, in fact, furious, which I hadn’t anticipated, since her wedding was one of necessity, or so my intel had informed me. Yet there was no denying the glitter of rage in her eyes, which made me wonder if she actually had feelings for the Bianchi boy.
Not that it matters. I would have taken her even if she was madly in love with him.
Still, it’s interesting that he was the one cowering before me in fear, not her. No, she basically flung my lack of manhood in my face, and while I’m very much secure in that manhood, the one thing I can’t resist is a challenge from a pretty woman. It added to the theatre of the moment, so I wasn’t averse to flinging her over my shoulder—except I’m regretting that now as she screams curses in my ear. Clearly she didn’t expect me to take her up on that challenge.
I stride down the steps to the waiting car, deafened by her continued shouting. She’s certainly not the good, quiet Salvatore princess I was led to expect by my sources, nor does she bear much of a resemblance to the terrified little girl I shoved in a closet all those years ago. No, she’s more a wildcat not wanting to be caught, which is unfortunate since I’ve now caught her.
By the end of the day, she’ll be my wife and then I’ll have the perfect hostage to the Salvatores’ good behaviour and that of their allies.
After my mother, Elena, died in a car bomb set by Salvatore soldiers, my father, Stefano, wanted the entire Salvatore family dead in revenge. But he failed. Now he’s gone and I’m head of the family, my goal is to get rid of them in a different way. By marrying their last heir and making her an Argenti.
The Salvatores and their friends are the last hold-outs, the last few families I have yet to bring under my control, and once Caterina is wearing my ring, they’ll at last be brought to heel, making the Argenti clan the most powerful of thecosa nostrafamilies in Sicily and Italy, if not all of Europe.
I have a reason for that, naturally enough, and it’s not just about power. It’s about the stain on the Argenti family honour, the stain put there by my father and his brutal killings of innocents. A stain I partially erased when I took him down myself, but there’s more still to do. It’s not enough that he’s dead. I have to change things completely, end the violence. Unite the families, stop the feuding and the vendettas, stop the killings of family by family, and to do that I need them brought under my rule.
Whether they want to be there or not.
I’m tired of the constant march of death and violence, and I will not have it, even if I have to perpetuate a little death and violence myself. The end will ultimately justify the means.
Though, ironically, it was the death of my mother and the Salvatores themselves that began this crusade of mine.
I was my father’s good little soldier back then, and when he ordered me to take some men and hit the Salvatore family, avenge my mother’s death and the stain on our family’s honour, I obeyed without question.
She’d once been bright and beautiful, a loving mother to me, but over the years, marriage to my father drained the life out of her, turned her into a husk of the woman she’d once been. A woman who preferred lying in a darkened bedroom with her pills to being with me. Even so, her death was a shock and I was desperate to make someone suffer for her loss.
Yet once I got to the Salvatores’ villa, everything changed.
Giovanni Salvatore must have had a warning that we were coming, because he was in the middle of escaping when we arrived. I got a shot at him, but it wasn’t a kill shot, and he unfortunately got away. Some of my men went after him, while I took the rest into the villa to get rid of any remaining Salvatores.
The men took the downstairs, while I went upstairs, and that’s when I found her. A little girl of no more than five. The Salvatore daughter, Caterina.
I was young, only twenty, yet already battle-hardened. Already wrought into the hard-line successor my father wanted and needed me to be, and I didn’t expect this to be a hard task—I’d killed men before, after all.
But this wasn’t a man, this was a child, and a child, it turned out, was different. She’d had a doll in her hand and the biggest green eyes I’d ever seen, her long black hair in braids. And she was terrified of me. Up until that point in my life, my father had taught me to have no morals and no boundaries except obedience to his will. Yet looking into the little girl’s terrified eyes, I found I did, in fact, have morals and boundaries.
I could not kill a child. She was blameless, an innocent, and while my mother had been innocent and blameless, too, killing this girl wasn’t going to bring her back. Even at twenty I didn’t have much of a soul left, not after my father took over my upbringing. Still, I had enough of one to understand that if I killed this girl, there would be no going back, not for me. I would become my father entirely. It was in that moment I knew that I didn’t want to be. I didn’teverwant to be a man who put his own revenge above a child’s life.
So I shoved her into a closet, ordered her not to make a sound, then I locked the door.
I went back downstairs, fully intending to stop the killing of Claudia and her son Alessio, my father be damned, but by the time I got down there, the rest of my men had already carried out my father’s plan. Both were dead.
Stefano punished me for my ‘failure’ and I still bear the scars, but even so, it was then that I’d decided. Those scars would serve as my vow to end the killing of innocents. End the violence of family against family.
Caterina Salvatore was the catalyst for that vow, and it’s fate that delivers her into my hands now. She’s the last piece I need to bring the families into line and once that is done the jigsaw will finally be complete. The families united under one law: mine.
Satisfaction settles in me, the way it always does when a plan goes completely to my design, though it would have been more ideal had she not been screeching in my ear like a banshee. To make matters even more uncomfortable, I can feel the softness and heat of her body draped over my shoulder, the warm scent of jasmine releasing as she struggles.
I’ve always liked the smell of flowers, yet it’s disturbing how much I like hers, mixed as it is with a musky, feminine note uniquely her own. I almost regret making her my wife in name only, but it’s merely a passing thought and not enough to change my mind. I have no patience for seduction these days, let alone seducing a woman I once rescued as a child and who sees me as the enemy. It’s not as if I don’t have many lovers anyway.
She lands yet another fist on my back as I approach the car, striking me as if she has no conception of who I am and what happened to the last person who laid a hand on me in anger. What she should be is grateful that I decided on marriage as the way to bring the Salvatores and their allies to me, instead of gunning everyone in that cathedral down. That’s what my father would have done. Myconsiglieriwas doubtful of the plan, since leaving anyone alive is not without its risks, but I wanted to do it without bloodshed.
Dio,I’m in danger of fucking growing a halo.
