She bites her lip, then takes a deep breath. "I may have… sent a letter to Maksim."
"What letter?" Fuck, what did she do this time?
"A letter from Alessandro." She swallows hard. "Except it wasn't actually from Alessandro."
I stare at her in disbelief. "You forged a letter from your brother to Maksim? Jesus Christ, Valentina, what did it say?"
"That the wedding needed to be postponed for security reasons." Her voice sounds so small. "I thought it would give us time to figure something out."
Us.
Except there’s no us. Not really.
A man died today. Maksim's men died. And for what? A schoolgirl scheme that never had a chance of working.
"Do you have any idea what you've done?" I try to temper my anger, but I’m not sure I’m succeeding. "Maksim will think Alessandro is backing out of their deal. He’ll see it as a betrayal.”
"I'm sorry. I just wanted more time."
“Time for what?” I snap.
She stares up at me with confusion that quickly turns to pain. “You said you were going to find a way that I wouldn’t have to marry him.”
Oh, fuck. I did say that.
And I have been racking my brain to figure out a way out of this marriage without a war, but deep down, I’ve felt the effort was fruitless.
Short of killing Maksim, I don’t see a way out of it.
And now she’s made it worse. Maksim will be hypervigilant about her and the Dantes, always looking for signs that Alessandro is about to start a war.
I shake my head as I press my fingers into my eye sockets wondering how we’re going to fix this.
Valentina sits up, clutching the sheet to her chest. Her eyes flash with that familiar Dante fire. "What was I supposed to do? Wait around tobe given away like property? My brothers decide who I speak to, where I go, and now who I'll marry. The one time I try to take control of my own fate?—"
"You start a war." My tone comes out harsher than intended.
Her chin tilts upward defiantly. "At least I did something. Everyone else was perfectly content to hand me over to a monster. Apparently, including you. Was that a lie you told me when you said you’d help me?"
I pull my shit together.
She's barely twenty and being forced into an impossible situation with no good options.
How can I blame her for fighting back the only way she knew how?
I reach for her hand. "No, it wasn’t a lie. But it was for me to figure out, not you. I admire that you refused to just accept your fate. But there are realities to our world you have to recognize."
"You think I don't understand our world?" Her eyes are hard as they stare at me with indignation. “I understand way better than any of you. The control. The domination. The being treated as something less than because I have breasts. I know exactly what our world is."
I feel for her, I really do. But our world can’t be bent to her will. "And people who break their vows end up dead."
"So I should just accept Maksim’s plans for me until he kills me?”
The thought makes my blood run cold. I reach for her, tilting her face up to mine. "No. But we need to be smarter.” I realize I’ve used “we” as if we’re in this together when the whole point is that I need to be figuring this out on my own.
"You think I'm just a foolish child who doesn't understand consequences," she accuses, pulling away from me. "But I'm so tired ofwalking on eggshells, worrying about what Alessandro might think, or Adriano, or Maksim, or the entire Mafia world."
She stands, dragging the sheet with her.
